Abhilasha Joshi
National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru
Abhilasha Joshi is a systems neuroscientist who is an Assistant Professor at NCBS. She has been fascinated by the synchronization of cognition and locomotion in the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in learning, memory, and spatial representation. She won the Peter and Patricia Gruber International Research Award from the Society for Neuroscience in 2023 for outstanding research and educational pursuit in an international setting for work on the rapid synchronization between internal cognitive representations and the stepping rhythm. She is also a Simons Foundation Fellows-to-Faculty Awardee. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford, she continued her postdoctoral work on cognition and movement at the University of California, San Francisco, and later in Lisbon, where she was a visiting scientist.
Session 2B: Symposium on “Neurocircuits Governing Behavior”
Uncovering the Links between Hippocampal Spatial Representations, Locomotor Stepping, and Memory
The hippocampus is a key brain structure that expresses spatial representations and is crucial for navigation. Navigation, in turn, intricately depends on locomotion; however, hippocampal spatial representations and the details of locomotor processes are typically investigated separately. Specifically, the hippocampus is thought to represent mainly higher-order cognitive and locomotor variables, whereas the limb movements that propel the animal are thought to be computed and represented primarily in subcortical circuits. In our prior work, we simultaneously monitored hippocampal activity and limb movements underlying locomotion. We found that the forelimb stepping cycle in freely-behaving rats is rhythmic and peaks at around 8 Hz during movement, matching the approximately 8 Hz modulation of hippocampal activity and spatial representations during locomotion. In this symposium talk, I will discuss those results and share some ongoing efforts to disrupt the hippocampal neural activity patterns during locomotion to investigate their effects on learning.