Speakers > Sylvia Wirth
Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod
Sylvia Wirth is a researcher at the Center for Cognitive Sciences in Lyon, France. Following a PhD in neuroscience, obtained at the University Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg, France, she dedicates her work to the understanding of the link between neural codes and memory codes in the non-human primate. More recently, her results demonstrated the existence in the macaque hippocampus, of a mechanism supporting high level cognitive neural abstraction (Baraduc et al., 2019). These results show how hippocampal neurons provide a powerful data compression mechanism by encoding recurrent events in a common pattern. Her research relies on state-of-the-art electrophysiology and virtual reality techniques adapted to non-human primates, as well as naturalistic approaches involving the collection of data from animals free to interact with their environment.
From visual space to memory space: insights from neural recordings in parietal cortex and hippocampus. How does a position in space reflect the processing of visual space to become a memory space? We show how neural selectivity to self-position in the posterior parietal cortex and hippocampus ties to saccades and fixations of salient cues during navigation in a virtual environment. Our results support a dynamic flow of activity organised along directed saccades and eye fixations towards anticipated landmarks at strategic position. We show how hippocampus may integrate target of fixation into a memory space, while parietal cortex drives saccades in the immediate space. We show how this translate in codes for position through a task-based processing of the visual cues, hence shedding light on the neural processes linking place and significant view.
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