Jiang Wanchen, PhDAssistant Professor

To adapt to complex and ever-changing environments, animals must exhibit highly flexible cognitive and behavioral strategies during interactions with their surroundings to ensure survival. This flexibility allows animals to rapidly generalize and apply acquired knowledge to new situations, facilitating quick learning and reasoning from limited observations. While cognitive and behavioral flexibility is a hallmark of biological intelligence, it remains a significant challenge for artificial intelligence.

Our Lab is dedicated to systematically investigating the neural basis of cognitive and behavioral flexibility across multiple dimensions, including neuronal activity, neural circuits, animal behavior, and theoretical models. The laboratory employs cutting-edge methods in both systems and theoretical neurobiology, as well as machine learning. These methods include complex cognitive behavioral tasks, neural calcium imaging in freely moving mice, high-throughput multi-electrode recording in behaving mice, optogenetics/chemogenetics, reinforcement learning, and deep learning. Our current research particularly focuses on the formation, dynamic updating, and generalization of cognitive maps in the hippocampus and cortex.