Najib Majaj
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Most neuroscience experiments study animals held still in front of a screen, on the assumption that what the brain does there reflects real life. That assumption has rarely been tested.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Computer Science
- Topics
systems neuroscience
foraging
spatial navigation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Compare neural computations and behavioral algorithms in macaques foraging head-free in a foraging room with those during head-fixed navigation in virtual reality, to test whether restrained lab conditions differ from naturalistic ones.
- Record simultaneously from posterior parietal, prefrontal, retrosplenial and entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus to track how these connected areas interact during foraging and navigation.
- Use behavioral models and theory to infer monkeys' internal states, such as beliefs and memories, during goal-driven foraging among three resource patches, and identify how these states are represented in the brain.
- Regress neuronal activity against task-relevant variables to find neural subspaces encoding them, and test the roles of hippocampal, frontal and parietal areas in different components of foraging.
More about the research
This project asks how the brain supports foraging, the search for food in a changing world, and whether brain activity in freely moving monkeys differs from activity in restrained monkeys doing similar tasks. Any differences would matter for how the whole field reads laboratory results.
Why it matters
Testing whether brain activity in restrained laboratory animals matches activity during natural behavior could change how neuroscience experiments are designed and interpreted. Revealing the general strategies brains use for naturalistic tasks like foraging and navigation could inform psychiatry and the design of artificial intelligence systems.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christopher D Harvey
Harvard University, MA·Neuroscience
Map effective connectivity among functionally identified neurons in the posterior parietal cortex during a virtual-reality navigation decision task, using cellular-resolution optogenetics to stimulate small groups of neurons and testing wiring motifs predicted by decision-making theories.
Jean-Marc Fellous
University of California-San Diego, CA·Neuroscience
Characterize whether ventral hippocampal place cells, whose firing zones are too broad to distinguish locations in small arenas, carry useful position information in very large environments, by recording dorsal and ventral hippocampus simultaneously in rats.
Noah John Cowan
Johns Hopkins University, MD·Neuroscience
Develop control-theory and machine-learning models to explain how and why animals switch between fast exploratory active sensing and slower goal-directed task control, based on internal estimates of sensory uncertainty.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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