Venue: Purkinje room (Broca centre – 2nd floor)
Invited by Xavier Hinaut (IMN)
Vinod Menon
Presentation of his lab in Stanford
https://www.med.stanford.edu/profiles/vinod-menon
Trang-Ahn Nghiem
Presentation of his work about Default Mode Network (DMN)
The discovery of the Default Mode Network (DMN) in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) experiments has sparked significant strides in our understanding of large-scale brain activity underlying cognition. The DMN constitutes an ensemble of tightly correlated cortical regions during resting state that plays a key role in brain function and dysfunction: the DMN is involved across a range of cognitive functions including self-referential thought, mind-wandering, and social cognition, and its structure and function are altered in psychiatric conditions including autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Yet, the DMN’s functional relevance outside in naturalistic settings, for free-moving and navigating individuals outside of MRI scanners, remains poorly understood. Further, the physiological mechanisms underlying DMN function and dysfunction in ASD remain elusive. First, I will discuss DMN dynamics and function during free spatial exploration. Leveraging analysis of multi-site fiber photometry recordings in freely exploring rodents and biophysical mean-field models of whole brain dynamics, I will discuss our work uncovering the prevalent part played by the DMN in encoding spatial information, as well as the causal influence of balance between excitation and inhibition at the neuronal scale on the emergence of DMN dynamics, function, and dysfunction as observed in children with ASD.