Pinto Lab
Principal Investigator: Lucas Pinto
Institution: University of Chicago (Chicago, IL)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary / Abstract Working memory is the ability to hold and manipulate information in short-term memory in the absence of sensory input. Recent investigation into the neural underpinnings of this key cognitive ability has highlighted the existence of distributed working-memory representations across the cortex of macaques and humans. However, we still do not understand how microcircuit components in different cortical areas support their potentially distinct contributions to working memory. To answer this question, my laboratory has developed a new working-memory paradigm for mice navigating in virtual reality, in which short-term memory is temporally disentangled from other task computations, and its duration manipulated systematically. This will allow for the integration of the unique genetic and optical toolkits available for mice. Our preliminary data from mesoscale calcium imaging of animals performing this new task show that the mouse dorsal cortex also contains distributed working-memory representations. Further, these distributed representations map onto a gradient of spontaneous activity timescales that increase from sensory to frontal areas. This is such that the…
Active NIH Awards
- 7R01MH138285-02: Microcircuit mechanisms behind the distributed cortical contributions to working memory (2026)
- 7R34NS138022-03: Inferring causality with spatiotemporally stochastic optogenetics (2025)
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