Diego Mendoza-Halliday, PhD

The mechanisms by which the brain maintains and manipulates mental representations in working memory, and how these mechanisms support other cognitive functions, such as attention, decision-making, and action-planning 

The Mendoza-Halliday Lab aims to understand the neuronal mechanisms underlying the generation, maintenance, and dynamic monitoring and transformation of working memory representations. We also aim to understand how working memory mechanisms interact with and support other brain functions such as perception, attention, decision-making, and action-planning, among others. ​To examine these mechanisms at the level of single neurons, microcircuits, and neuronal populations across multiple brain regions, we simultaneously record the activity of large numbers of individual neurons across cortical layers and across regions using high-density laminar electrophysiological methods during the performance of complex visual cognitive tasks requiring the maintenance and manipulation of mental representations in working memory. This allows us to investigate how electrophysiological activity in different neurons, neuron types, cortical layers, and brain regions, as well as their communication, relates to these cognitive functions. To examine the causal role that neurons in different brain regions play in working memory maintenance and manipulation, we experimentally inactivate or activate these neurons using customized large-scale optogenetic methods we developed.