CNS 2025 | Young Investigator Award Lectures

Congratulations to Emily S. Finn and Andre' Bastos for being awarded the 2025 Young Investigator Award. We look forward to hearing their award lectures at CNS 2025!

About the YIA Award

The purpose of the Young Investigator Award is to recognize outstanding contributions by scientists early in their career. Two awardees are named by the Awards Committee, and are honored at the CNS Annual meeting.

One stimulus, many interpretations: The neuroscience of subjective experience

Emily S. Finn, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College
Monday, March 31, 2025, 1:30 - 2:00 pm, Constitution Ballroom

That the same sensory experience (e.g., a photograph, a video clip) can generate distinct, sometimes polar opposite, reactions in different people is obvious to anyone who lives in today’s society. When, how, and why do people diverge in their subjective interpretations of a stimulus? While high-level social scenarios, in contrast to basic perceptual information, are most likely to generate divergent interpretations across people, it has been challenging to elicit and quantify these interpretations in experimental settings. In this talk, I will cover recent work in my lab using behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational approaches to understand how features of individuals, features of external input, and brain activity interact to give rise to nuanced percepts of complex social information.

 

Multi-Area, high-Density, Laminar Neurophysiology (MaDeLaNe) recordings suggest Predictive Coding is implemented via Predictive Routing

André M. Bastos, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN
Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:00 - 2:30 pm, Constitution Ballroom

To understand the neural basis of cognition, we must understand how top-down control of bottom-up sensory inputs is achieved. We have marshaled evidence for a cortical control circuit that involves rhythmic interactions between different cortical layers. We've found that local field potential (LFP) power in the gamma band (40-100 Hz) is strongest in superficial layers (layers 2/3), and LFP power in the alpha/beta band (8-30 Hz) is strongest in deep layers (layers 5/6). The gamma-band is strongly linked to bottom-up sensory processing and neuronal spiking carrying stimulus information, while the alpha/beta-band is linked to top-down processing. Deep layer alpha/beta is negatively coupled to gamma. Cortical areas become rhythmically prepared to receive their inputs by engaging in inhibitory alpha/beta oscillations. Prediction “errors” are the result of sensory inputs to unprepared cortex. We refer to this combination of mechanisms as Predictive Routing. I will present new evidence that causally supports Predictive Routing from studies of propofol anesthesia. I will also present Multi-Area, high-Density, Laminar Neurophysiology (MaDeLaNe) recordings in both macaque and mouse cortex as subjects observed (un)predictable visual stimulus sequences. These high-density recordings give us an unprecedented look into neuronal activity across the hierarchy and allow us to determine at which stage of processing a sensory-based code is transformed into a prediction-based code. Altogether, these observations suggest Predictive Routing: that the interplay of rhythms is a circuit mechanism for predictive processing, and that genuine predictions are computed in higher-order cortical regions.

 

---

Previous Winners

2025	2024 Peter Kok, University College London Ella Striem-Amit, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC
2023 Anna Schapiro, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania Freek van Ede, Ph.D., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam	2022 Oriel FeldmanHall, Brown University Vishnu "Deepu" Murty, Temple University
2021 Anne Collins, UC Berkeley Amitai Shenhav, Brown University	2020 Catherine Hartley, New York University Samuel J. Gershman, Harvard University
2019 Muireann Irish, The University of Sydney, Australia Michael W. Cole, Rutgers University – Newark	2018 Morgan Barense, University of Toronto Michael Yassa, University of California, Irvine
2017 Leah Somerville, Ph.D., Harvard University Nicholas Turk-Browne, Ph.D., Princeton University	2016 Adriana Galvan, UCLA Joel Voss, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
2015 Donna Rose Addis, Ph.D., University of Auckland, NZ Christopher Summerfield, Ph.D., University of Oxford	2014 Daphna Shohamy, Ph.D. , Columbia University David Badre, Ph.D., Brown University
2013 Uta Noppeney, Ph.D., University of Birmingham, UK Tor Wager, Ph.D., University of Colorado	2012 Adam Aron, Ph.D., University of California San Diego Roshan Cools, Ph.D., Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
2011 Michael J. Frank, Ph.D., Brown University Elizabeth Kensinger, Ph.D., Boston College	2010 Kara Federmeier, University of Illinois Adam Anderson, University of Toronto
2009 Lila Davachi, New York University Clayton Curtis, New York University	2008 Charan Ranganath, University of California Davis Kevin Ochsner, Columbia University Rebecca Saxe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2007 Silvia A. Bunge, University of California Steven Laureys, MD, University of Liège	2006 Frank Tong, Vanderbilt University Alumit Ishai, University of Zurich
2005 Sabine Kastner, Princeton University Kevin LaBar, Duke University	2004 Anthony Wagner, Stanford University Eleanor Maguire, University College London
2003 Roberto Cabeza, Duke University Sharon Thompson-Schill, University of Pennsylvania	2002 Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University Randy Buckner, Washington University Saint Louis