Lucas Tian

The Laboratory of Cognitive Neural Systems, housed in the Center for Neural Science on Washington Square campus, studies how the mind arises from computations implemented in neural circuits of the brain and how disruption of those computations underlies brain disorders. The lab is specifically interested in the neural basis of cognition, focusing on how neural systems learn and generalize by representing the world's abstract, compositional structure and, in turn, reorganizing that structure to solve novel problems. An overall approach is to develop hypotheses for specific cognitive algorithms, to formally model them using computer simulations, and to empirically test them using neural recordings and circuit perturbations. We apply this approach in the context of high-dimensional motor and cognitive tasks that require novel problem solving in both humans and non-human primates. We use a wide range of approaches, including large-scale electrophysiology during behavior, circuit perturbation using optogenetics, neural network modeling of brain function, development of neural decoding algorithms, and robotics-based novel task development.