Canada

Self motion is composed of both rotational and translational motions which occur with characteristic statistics in everyday life. In the context of rotation, we have previously shown that neurons at the first central stage of vestibular processing (VN) are adapted to match their tuning curves to the statistics of natural rotation. This strategy effectively removes redundancy in the neural response, and produces responses which are independent of frequency (i.e. temporally whitened). However, unlike for rotation, translation sensitive neurons display significantly more heterogeneity in their tuning curves to artificial stimuli, and their responses to natural stimuli which cover the full physiological range of motion frequencies has not been explored. Here we investigated whether and, if so, how the responses of translation sensitive vestibular-only (otolith VO) cells in the VN of awake behaving macaques are adapted to naturalistic translation stimuli. Our results indicate that otolith VOs are not consistently matched to natural statistics in the same way as their rotation-sensitive counterparts, and instead fall roughly into 3 categories covering a range from strongly low-pass filtered to optimally whitened responses. This study is the first to examine the responses of otolith VO neurons in the context of natural self-motion, and suggests that low-pass filtered, faithful reconstruction, and optimally encoded representations of the stimulus may each be implemented in the translational vestibular system via parallel encoding strategies.

CAN-ACN 2021

Neuronal sensitivity and variability mediate 3 parallel strategies for encoding natural translations in the primate vestibular system

macaque

coding strategies

vestibular

Colleagues and Friends:

I am very happy to welcome you to the 14th annual Canadian Neuroscience Meeting, and to the first virtual edition of our meeting. I want to highlight the important work the CAN meeting chair, **Roger Thompson** and co-chair, **Alyson Fournier**, did to put together the great program we are offering this year. Moving to a virtual format required a complete re-design of the program, and both Roger and Alyson did a splendid job in providing us with an appealing and well adapted program for our first virtual event. I wish to thank them for this very important effort.

Highlights of this year’s scientific meeting include invited speakers **Michael Hausser, Franck Polleux, Gwyneth Card, Magdalena Götz**and Brain Prize winner **Huda Zoghbi**. Plenary and parallel symposia, proposed by our members complete our diverse [scientific program.](https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/program-2021/)

The 2021 Advocacy session, chaired and organized by CAN advocacy committee chair **Karun Singh**, will feature a special lecture and question period with Member of Parliament and past Science Minister **Kirsty Duncan**. This will be followed by a short overview of CAN’s advocacy activities over the last year. We invite you to participate in this session for insight from Dr. Duncan on the workings of Parliament Hill, and to learn more about what CAN has been doing to promote neuroscience research in Canada.

We are also excited to host **Lisa Willis** in the Equity Diversity and Inclusion session, organized by EDI committee chair **Jibran Khokhar**.

A special highlight of our meeting will be the lectures by award-winning young neuroscientists. We are please to host the CAN 2020 Young Investigator Award winner **Mihaela Iordanova**, and CAN 2021 Young Investigator Award winners **Aaron Phillips** and **Tabrez Siddiqui**. Highlights will also include presentation by the top three winners of the CAN-CIHR-INMHA Brain Star Award winners, **Claire Gizowski, Nuria Daviu Abant** and **Lukas Tamayo-Orrego**.

Independently organized satellite symposia complement and complete this exciting program, check them out here: https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/2021-satellite-symposia/

Some of the most engaging sessions are always the poster sessions featuring the work of our trainees, so make sure to log in to Gather Town during the poster sessions to chat with the presenters.
We hope you enjoy this program, and look forward to welcoming you, virtually.

Shernaz Bamji

President of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience

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Please head to https://can-acn.org/meeting-2021/registration-2021/ to register. 

14th Canadian Neuroscience Meeting from August 23rd-25th

poster

Insights into neural characteristics that predict perineuronal net expression in brain circuitry

Effector-specific spatial codes in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during a head-unrestrained reach task

dI3 interneurons maintain hindlimb motor tone in mice following spinal cord injury

Exploring the interaction between function and organization in mouse visual cortex using a novel spatially integrated optogenetic system

Mechanisms for integrating allocentric and egocentric visual information for goal-directed movements: a neural network approach

Functional network topography reveals dorsal-ventral cortical modules for visual feature memory, and lateralized modules that combine for transsaccadic integration

Sexual dimorphism in a neuronal mechanism of spinal hyperexcitability across rodent and human models of pathological pain

Gain adaptation and variability of vestibular corticothalamic neurons shape our perception of natural self motion stimuli

Optogenetic expression in the cortical and subcortical areas of the non-human primate vestibular system

Second-order attribute of head motion is encoded at single-neuron level in the vestibular nuclei

Neuronal sensitivity and variability mediate 3 parallel strategies for encoding natural translations in the primate vestibular system

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Insights into neural characteristics that predict perineuronal net expression in brain circuitry

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Optogenetic expression in the cortical and subcortical areas of the non-human primate vestibular system

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