Biology Seminar Series: Hannah Payne, "Coordination of hippocampal codes for physical and visual space in food-caching birds"

Hannah Payne is a postdoctoral researcher in the Aronov lab at Columbia University. Her graduate studies with Jennifer Raymond at Stanford University examined how the cerebellum learns to control eye movements. As a postdoc, Hannah pioneered neural recordings in food-caching birds, memory specialists that rely on the hippocampus to hide and retrieve large numbers of food items across their environment. She found remarkable similarities between the functional properties of the hippocampus in birds and mammals, and recently combined her interests in vision and learning to ask how visual and physical representations are coordinated during active vision in these highly visual animals. Her long-term goal is to leverage food-caching behavior to understand how perceptual and mnemonic circuits interact to implement memory and guide behavior.