Princeton Neuroscience Institute

Humans are adept at setting goals and updating them as new situations arise — for example, a person who is playing a video game may switch to a new goal when their phone rings.

Princeton University neuroscientists are poised to play a leading role in revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain as outlined in President Barack Obama's BRAIN Initiative.

Making decisions involves a gradual accumulation of facts that support one choice or another. A person choosing a college might weigh factors such as course selection, institutional reputation and the quality of future job prospects.

Congratulations to graduate students Nathan Parker (PNI) and Joel Finkelstein (joint degree in Psychology & PNI) for being awarded prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowships for 2013, as well as to Adrianna Loback (PNI) for receiving an honorable mention.

What are MHC class I proteins (here in green), which are famous for their role in the immune system, doing in newly-born neurons (purple) in the prenatal brain, well before the maturation of the immune response? Hints at as-yet-unknown functions for these immune proteins in the earliest stages of brain development.

Our experience of the world seems to divide naturally into discrete, temporally extended events, yet the mechanisms underlying the learning and identification of events are poorly understood. Research on event perception has focused on transient elevations in predictive uncertainty or surprise as the primary signal driving event segmentation.

The study, pub­lished in the jour­nal Nature, indi­cates that cer­tain position-tracking neu­rons — called grid cells — ramp their activ­ity up and down by work­ing together in a col­lec­tive way to deter­mine loca­tion, rather than each cell act­ing on its own as was pro­posed by a com­pet­ing theory.

Asif Ghazanfar, an associate professor of psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, received one of two 2013 Troland Research Awards presented to outstanding young investigators in experimental psychology.

Researchers at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) are tackling some of the biggest mysteries of the human mind: Why we think and behave as we do, how we make decisions, how we choose what to ignore and remember, and how we can learn to forget

Princeton neuroscientists have been awarded a $4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to explore how the human brain enables us to pursue goals and juggle priorities in an environment full of distractions.