Grant: Team Grant: Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience (NeuroNex)

Mental representations are at the essence of high-level cognition. They allow us to memorize information for a matter of seconds and use it or are erased in the near future. Mental representations that are independent from sensory and motor signals are thought to arise in primates with the development of the prefrontal cortex. It has been speculated that the same features of the neocortex that allow mental representations to reach its high level of abstraction in humans are the key to our knowledge of mental diseases such as Schizophrenia and other psychosis where mental representations and reality become intermingled. This proposal studies the specializations that allow primates to generate mental representations with these qualities. We study primate brains across species at multiple levels, from molecules to single neurons to networks. Finally, we elaborate on a theoretical and computational model of the primate neocortex that explains at a mechanistic level how mental representations arise and have evolved across species. We pooled the efforts of an international team, USA, Germany and Canada, of experts in different disciplines organized into four International Research Groups (IRGs). IRG1 study mental representations in behaving primates and record the activity of hundreds of neurons during naturalistic tasks. It also manipulates the receptors and chemical systems of the brain to investigate essential mechanisms and their functioning during behavior. IRG2 investigates how neurons fire, their morphology, their connectivity profiles and their chemical regulation in brain slices providing a microscopic picture of brain circuits. IRG3 investigates mRNA and protein expression in different cell types across the brain of different species of primates. IRG4 uses modelling tools to synthesize the knowledge of all the other groups and produce a comprehensive picture with mechanistic insight into the functioning of mental representations in the primate brain.