OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
We recorded neural activity in the brains of freely-moving rats while they performed behavioral tasks for food reward. Neuronal responses to sounds depended strongly on the behavioral state: responses during behavior had more task-relevant information than responses during passive listening. Surprisingly, we also observed slow firing rate modulations that were task-related, not associated with sounds, and substantially larger than the sound-evoked responses. Modeling suggests that the large task-related rate modulations shape sound-driven responses during behavior. I will describe approaches for analyzing the fine-grained behavior of the animals and for deriving hypotheses about the nature of non-auditory, task-related activity.
