Zilong Ji

Deadline for these jobs is 5th September, so you've got until next week on Friday to apply! Come join us in beautiful York, complete with Minsters, snickelways, fMRI and OPMs - what more could you ask for?!

#neuroskyence #neurojobs #psychscisky #cognition #psychjobs

🚨 We’re hiring: Associate Professor/Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience

🧠 Lead pioneering imaging-informed cognitive neuroscience research
🌍 Open to international applicants | Visa sponsorship available
📍 Permanent, full-time, on-site
🔗 Apply now: www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...

It may also depend on the way we look at adaptation. In those juxtacellular recordings, HDCs fire persistently (in a spike bursting way) when the head was maintained at the preferred direction. But in a short bursting period, we might observe adaptation.

In summary, anticipatory firing, theta skipping, and phase precession are distinct single-cell firing features that can be reconciled within the same head direction attractor network. These features depend on whether the cells exhibit internal firing rate adaptation and receive external theta input.

These findings can be unified by a simple ring attractor model of head direction cells with theta input and intrinsic firing rate adaptation in neural firing—a phenomenon we identified in HDCs within the anteroventral thalamic nucleus.

Interestingly, phase precession relative to turning angle was more prevalent in
those tmHDCs showing theta cycle skipping effect, i.e., HDCs fire on alternate theta
cycles. Furthermore, tmHDCs showing a higher degree of theta skipping exhibit a higher degree of phase precession.

tmHDCs with theta phase precession display similar features as place cells
with theta phase precession, such as an intrinsic firing frequency higher than the
LFP theta frequency, increased degree of phase precession as the head rotates faster.

tmHDCs show theta phase precession relative to turning angle, i.e. as the animal
rotates its head, these cells fire at progressively earlier theta phases as the head
direction sweeps through their directional firing fields (like grid and place cells when animals run through their firing fields).

Head direction cells (HDCs) are neurons found in several brain regions that increase
their firing rates above baseline levels only when the animal's head points in a specific direction. It has been shown that many HDCs in the anteroventral thalamic nucleus are modulated by theta rhythms (tmHDCs).

Phase Precession Relative to Turning Angle in Theta‐Modulated Head Direction Cells Grid and place cells typically fire at progressively earlier phases within each cycle of the theta rhythm as rodents run across their firing fields, a phenomenon known as theta phase precession. Here...

Excited to share our latest paper: “Phase Precession Relative to Turning Angle in Theta-Modulated Head Direction Cells” together with Dr. Eleonora Lomi (co-first author) Prof. @katejj.bsky.social Prof. Anna Mitchell and Prof. @neilburgess10.bsky.social
doi.org/10.1002/hipo...

Human neural dynamics of real-world and imagined navigation - Nature Human Behaviour Seeber et al. studied brain recordings from implanted electrodes in freely moving humans. Neural dynamics encoded actual and imagined routes similarly, demonstrating parallels between navigational, im...

🧠 Our new (NIH funded!) paper reveals how the brain creates internal dynamics during both real- and imagined navigation. We recorded directly from the human hippocampus as participants moved through physical space and when they mentally navigated imagined routes.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This is cool! As a CCN student (2017) and a TA during the pandemic (2021), I highly recommend. It is also a good opportunity to explore China. CCN will happen again in Suzhou this time, which is a famous historical and cultural city in China.

A systems model of alternating theta sweeps via firing rate adaptation Ji, Chu et al. present a network model of direction and grid cells, which generates an internal direction signal comprised of alternating left-right sweeps of encoded location and direction, based on ...

See here for our paper: www.cell.com/current-biol.... It is a great pleasure to work on this model with Tianhao, Si Wu and @neilburgess10.bsky.social. Also, I highly recommend to first read the experimental paper by @azvollan.bsky.social and colleagues: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Navigation: Scanning your future path A new model of how we plan pathways through the world shows that populations of neurons that code our current position, including entorhinal grid cells and head direction cells, could interact to aid ...

I really enjoyed reading this commentary of our recent paper about modeling left-right sweeps in grid cells: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... from Prof. Michael Hasselmo, Dr. Jennifer Robinson and Dr. Patrick LaChance.

Ha ha. I am indecently excited by this! I think there are so many amazing neuroscience stories that don’t get told it’s great to be able to show some of them off! I hope the kids (and adults!) that read this will be as excited as I am about the way the brain works.

Very happy to see this out! Based on the microcircuit identified by Vollan et al., we made some interesting predictions about theta sweeps along the parasubiculum-MEC-HPC pathway, especially theta modulated head direction cells which direct the left-right sweeps in downstream grid cells.

I have been reading about cognitive maps and finding this literature fascinating, in particular that they could be reused to generalize. But is there really evidence for this?

More generally, IYO what piece of evidence is missing to demonstrates the brain uses CM in important ways?

Please RT🙏

UCL – University College London UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

ICN is hiring at Prof / reader level. Come and join the best and most fabulous cognitive neuroscience department anywhere www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/.... Please share

@cosynemeeting.bsky.social workshops are posted and they’re 🔥🔥🔥, as always.

www.cosyne.org/workshops-pr...

#cosyne #cosyne2025 #neuroskyence

Happy head direction cell day y’all!

On this day, 41 years ago, Jim Ranck recorded the first “HD cell” in his Brooklyn lab in 1984.

Jim shared the news with the world at SFN that year, showing a video of the cell’s firing on a TV he somehow acquired and brought to his poster… (1/3)

Tribute to pioneering cognitive neuroscientist Professor Eleanor Maguire UCL colleagues and alumni have paid tribute to the award-winning researcher, Professor Eleanor Maguire, whose groundbreaking studies into spatial awareness and memory, led to a deeper understanding of...

UCL colleagues and alumni have paid tribute to award-winning researcher, Professor Eleanor Maguire @uclqsion.bsky.social, whose studies into spatial awareness and memory led to a deeper understanding of how the brain works and had a profound impact on neuroscience www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2025/ja...

Wondering about area differences

Disordered Hippocampal Reactivations Predict Spatial Memory Deficits in a Mouse Model of Alzheimer's Disease Alzheimer's disease (AD) is characterised by progressive memory decline associated with hippocampal degeneration. However, the specific physiological mechanisms underlying hippocampal dysfunction in A...

Excited to share that our preprint is out!
doi.org/10.1101/2024...

The structure of place cell reactivations was disordered in AD mice compared to WT! This was predictive of reduced place cell stability and memory performance on a radial-arm maze task.

Here are a few details:

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