Specific Picture details:

Picture Caption: Newly formed cells in the hippocampus of an adult chickadee Research/Long description: New cells (black), many of them neurons, continue to form throughout life in many parts of the brains of birds. Here they are dividing in a zone of the hippocampus next to the ventricle, in an adult chickadee. As they mature, these cells migrate away from the venticle and deep into the hippocampus. Grad student Bernard Tarr has found that changes in the birds' housing environment can affect the volume of the hippocampus. He is now determining whether this treatment also affects the survival or destination of such new cells. Contributed by: Timothy J. DeVoogd

Research/Photo Gallery

Other gallery pictures

Neurons within song control nucleus RA project to the hypoglossal nucleus, which in turn ennervates muscles used in singing in birds. These neurons are much more elaborate in males than in females, in species in which only males sing. In species that sing seasonally, the neurons are highly sensitive to hormones--they add perhaps 40% more connections as steroid levels rise in the spring, and lose them when the hormone levels drop in summer and fall. Contributed by: Timothy J. DeVoogd

When participants are instructed to click an object on the computer screen, the continuous trajectory of the mouse (green circles) exhibits attraction effects from objects with similar names (i.e., the candle).  These continuous attraction effects share much in common with a dynamical system settling into one or another of its attractor basins (shown underneath). See Spivey, Grosjean, & Knoblich (2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Contributed by: Michael J. Spivey

This shows a 3rd instar larvae that has been dissected to show the musculature and the nervous system. The two white circles are the brain lobes, and the oval below it is the ganglion, where all the axons reach out to innervate muscles.

The pressures of evolution have maximized the brain's processing speed and metabolic efficiency. Therefore, to understand why neurons in early visual cortex respond to specific visual patterns, you simply have to learn an appropriate efficient code. Here, we used independent components analysis (ICA) on a series of whitened image patches taken from pictures of natural scenes - rocks, trees, fields... For each filter, the "neuron" will fire if the image is bright on the bright spots and dark on the dark spots (more precisely, it's a linear filter). Some of these resemble simple cells in early visual cortex, as they have a characteristic oriented bright/dark pattern (like 2-D gabor functions, to be more precise). The idea is that the more filters derived from an efficient coding of natural scenes resemble those of neurons in early visual cortex, the better we understand how the brain processes visual input. For a more thorough understanding please visit http://emva.net/educational/introduction.html Contributed by: Mark V. Albert

Shown here is a male beaugregory damselfish courting a female who is in a bottle. Males are given territories made of PVC piping (artificial nest sites) which are considered high-quality nests by males and females. Males on these sites dramatically increase their reproduction, courtship, and aggression levels over males on natural nest sites. We test the effects of neuropeptides on these behaviors as well as the male's vocalizations.

Please report corrections, questions, comments, and problems to: Lori Miller (lmm8 AT cornell.edu)