Nelson Totah

My laboratory is primarily interested in recording and manipulating neural circuits involved in organisms’ ability to adapt to an unpredictable environment. We focus on interactions between cognitive circuits (anterior cingulate cortex, ACC) and action selection and control circuits (motor cortex, basal ganglia), which occur in the context of neuromodulation by the noradrenergic locus coeruleus (LC). My laboratory has pioneered new behavioral methods using a head-fixed rat-on-a-treadmill apparatus, which enables psychophysical studies, high resolution monitoring of behavioral responses (treadmill running), and complex cognitive tasks (e.g., auditory-visual attentional set-shifting) in combination with pupillometry and recording single unit spiking and local field potentials from multiple regions simultaneously, as well as brain-wide EEG. We have also established the recordings of many LC neurons at once by employing a multi-electrode probe in anesthetized rats and are working with collaborators in biomedical engineering to develop new tools for recording LC ensembles in awake, behaving rats. The lab has focused primarily on studying (1) the role of attention in learning, (2) neuromodulation-triggered cortical network resetting in relation to changing learning strategies, and (3) how the brain detects and stops in-progress mistakes.