Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Munich

Somatosensory Influence on Vertical Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex - new publication by Glasauer and Straka labs: The vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) consists of two components, the rotational VOR (rVOR) elicited by semicircular canal signals and the translational VOR (tVOR) elicited by otolith signals. Given the relevant role of the vertical tVOR in human walking, this study aimed at measuring the time delay of eye movements in relation to whole-body vertical translations in natural standing position. Twenty (13 females and 7 males) healthy, young subjects (mean 25 years) stood upright on a motor-driven platform and were exposed to sinusoidal movements while fixating a LED, positioned at a distance of 50 cm in front of the eyes. The platform motion induced a vertical translation of 2.6 cm that provoked counteracting eye movements similar to self-paced walking. The time differences between platform and eye movements indicated that the subject’s timing of the extraocular motor reaction depended on stimulus frequency and number of repetitions. At low stimulus frequencies (<0.8 Hz) and small numbers of repetitions (<3), eye movements were phase advanced or in synchrony with platform movements. At higher stimulus frequencies or continuous stimulation, eye movements were phase lagged by ∼40 ms. Interestingly, the timing of eye movements depended on the initial platform inclination. Starting with both feet in dorsiflexion, eye movements preceded platform movements by 137 ms, whereas starting with both feet in plantar flexion eye movement precession was only 19 ms. This suggests a remarkable influence of foot proprioceptive signals on the timing of eye movements, indicating that the dynamics of the vertical tVOR is controlled by somatosensory signals.
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SnakeStrike: Low-Cost 3D Motion Capture System - new publication by Kohl and Straka labs: Current neuroethological experiments require sophisticated technologies to precisely quantify the behavior of animals. In many studies, solutions for video recording and subsequent tracking of animal behavior form a major bottleneck. Three-dimensional (3D) tracking systems have been available for a few years but are usually very expensive and rarely include very high-speed cameras; access to these systems for research is limited. Additionally, establishing custom-built software is often time consuming – especially for researchers without high-performance programming and computer vision expertise. Here, we present an open-source software framework that allows researchers to utilize low-cost high-speed cameras in their research for a fraction of the cost of commercial systems. This software handles the recording of synchronized high-speed video from multiple cameras, the offline 3D reconstruction of that video, and a viewer for the triangulated data, all functions previously also available as separate applications. It supports researchers with a performance-optimized suite of functions that encompass the entirety of data collection and decreases processing time for high-speed 3D position tracking on a variety of animals, including snakes. Motion capture in snakes can be particularly demanding since a strike can be as short as 50 ms, literally twice as fast as the blink of an eye. This is too fast for faithful recording by most commercial tracking systems and therefore represents a challenging test to our software for quantification of animal behavior. Therefore, we conducted a case study investigating snake strike speed to showcase the use and integration of the software in an existing experimental setup.
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Oxygen consumption and neuronal activity - new publication by Straka lab: Located in News
Workshop "Linking behavioral and neural dynamics", Oct 16 (online): Online workshop "Linking behavioral and neural dynamics" on Friday, 16 October 2020, 5pm-8pm CEST
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Talk by Brent Doiron, today, 5 p.m. CET: Nov 16, 2020, 5 p.m. Brent Doiron "Dimensions of variability in circuit models of cortex"
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BCCN Munich video channel: A video channel for our Bernstein lecture series has been launched on Vimeo.
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Talk by Mark Churchland, today, 5 p.m. CET: Nov 30, 2020, 5 p.m. Mark Churchland "Motor Cortex in Theory and Practice"
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Talk by Marianne Fyhn, today, 5 p.m. CET: Dec 7, 2020, 5 p.m. Marianne Fyhn "Perturbing the spatio-temporal organization of the grid cell network"
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Workshop "Analysis of body motion behavior" Jan 27: This discussion workshop introduces approaches for analyzing different aspects of body motion behavior – from head and eye movements to categorizing full body motion – and gives application examples in psychophysics, neuroscience and virtual reality research.
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Bernstein SmartSteps: Apply for "Bernstein SmartSteps - featuring early career scientists"
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