this is for holding javascript data
Sean Maguire edited Introduction.md
over 9 years ago
Commit id: 9d74ba397923d1d07e57341e50e6457a4b0e7277
deletions | additions
diff --git a/Introduction.md b/Introduction.md
index e421ef6..089af9b 100644
--- a/Introduction.md
+++ b/Introduction.md
...
#Introduction
Introduction Animals are bombarded with visual, acoustic, chemical, tactile and social information as they navigate their environment. The central nervous system integrates these stimuli with internal information and past experience in order to
guide adaptive behavioral decisions (i.e. approach or avoidance of a salient stimulus). Even controlled laboratory presentations of stimuli are not processed in the brain with static stimulus-response chains, but rather processing depends on the
project state of local and
listing my thesis aims, distributed brain networks. The network state is the emergent structure of ongoing activity in the brain: the response properties of one neural element (e.g. a single neuron, assembly of neurons or a brain region) is affected by the modulatory activity of the network it is embedded in [@Bressler:2007ty]. Neural context (i.e. network state) is a determinative factor in sensory processing, influencing not only the perception of stimuli but also
goals behavioral decision-making.
Across vertebrates, social behavior is linked to a core network of brain regions called the social decision making network (SDMN). The SDMN is comprised of
11 brain regions, many of which are bidirectionally connected to one another and are sensitive to sex steroid hormones (SSH). They have been linked to a large variety of social and sexual behaviors across vertebrates [@OConnell:2011hk; @Newman:1999ve; @Crews:2003il; @Goodson:2005gb].
My overarching hypothesis is that neural context in the SDM network represents an animals internal computing framework for interpreting external social information and that SSHs preconfigure the neural context of the network. Consistent with this
report. hypothesis, I expect that ongoing neural activity will be influenced by SSHs and that this neuromodulatory patterning will be correlated to the neural responses evoked by social interaction. As a general approach I will exploit the different time courses of two neural activity measures, cytochrome oxidase and egr-1, within the same animals to measure ongoing neural activity and also activity evoked by social interactions.