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Paulk, Angelique

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Paulk

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Angelique

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Paulk, Angelique

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    Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2024-07-03) Jamali, Mohsen; Grannan, Benjamin; Cai, Jing; Khanna, Arjun; Munoz Miranda, William; Caprara, Irene; Paulk, Angelique; Cash, Sydney; Fedorenko, Evelina; Williams, Ziv
    From sequences of speech sounds, or letters, humans can extract rich and nuanced meaning through language. This capacity is essential for human communication. Yet, despite a growing understanding of the brain areas that support linguistic and semantic processing, the derivation of linguistic meaning in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action potentials remains largely unknown. Here, we recorded from single cells in the left language-dominant prefrontal cortex as participants listened to semantically diverse sentences and naturalistic stories. By tracking their activities during natural speech processing, we discover a remarkably fine scale representation of semantic information by individual neurons. These neurons responded selectively to specific word meanings and reliably distinguished words from nonwords. Their activities were also dynamic, reflecting the words’ meanings based on their specific sentence contexts and independent of their phonetic form. Modeled collectively, we show how these cell ensembles accurately predicted the broad semantic categories of the words as they were heard in real-time during speech. We also show how they encoded the hierarchical structure of these meaning representations and how they mapped onto the population’s response patterns. Together, these findings reveal a detailed organization of semantic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and begin to illuminate the cellular-level processing of meaning during language comprehension.
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    Oscillatory brain activity in spontaneous and induced sleep stages in flies
    (Nature Publishing Group UK, 2017) Yap, Melvyn H. W.; Grabowska, Martyna J.; Rohrscheib, Chelsie; Jeans, Rhiannon; Troup, Michael; Paulk, Angelique; van Alphen, Bart; Shaw, Paul J.; van Swinderen, Bruno
    Sleep is a dynamic process comprising multiple stages, each associated with distinct electrophysiological properties and potentially serving different functions. While these phenomena are well described in vertebrates, it is unclear if invertebrates have distinct sleep stages. We perform local field potential (LFP) recordings on flies spontaneously sleeping, and compare their brain activity to flies induced to sleep using either genetic activation of sleep-promoting circuitry or the GABAA agonist Gaboxadol. We find a transitional sleep stage associated with a 7–10 Hz oscillation in the central brain during spontaneous sleep. Oscillatory activity is also evident when we acutely activate sleep-promoting neurons in the dorsal fan-shaped body (dFB) of Drosophila. In contrast, sleep following Gaboxadol exposure is characterized by low-amplitude LFPs, during which dFB-induced effects are suppressed. Sleep in flies thus appears to involve at least two distinct stages: increased oscillatory activity, particularly during sleep induction, followed by desynchronized or decreased brain activity.