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Research
A principal goal of
systems neuroscience is to quantify brain activity underlying sensory
perception and behaviour. Key questions include: how different stimuli
are
represented in neuronal activity. How an animal ignores less relevant
stimulus
information and focuses on those stimulus features that are meaningful
to a behavioural
task? How an animal learns to associate a
stimulus with reward?
The Neural Coding Lab
has a broad
interest in systems neuroscience spanning areas such as sensory coding,
adaptation and learning. We perform neuronal recording from cortex and
deep brain structures in
anaesthetized as well as
awake behaving rats, and apply methods such as information theory to
quantify the way by
which single neurons or neuronal ensembles code for sensory
stimuli or for the animal's behaviour.
The rat whisker-barrel system
is our system of choice. It is also the rat's sensory system of choice
for
exploring the environment and collecting information about the
location, shape, size and texture of objects around it. The system is
well suited to examining neural coding issues because of its functional efficiency and its
elegant structural organization.
The
whisker area of somatosensory cortex (known as barrel cortex) is
arranged as a topographic map of the whiskers (Woolsey and Van der
Loos,
1970; Welker
1971). This means that sensory signals arising in one whisker are
channelled through a restricted population of neurons and can be
sampled by an electrode at different stages of the sensory system. This
line of research is in close
collaboration with Mathew Diamond's lab at SISSA, Trieste, Italy.
| The Neural Coding Lab
also performs human psychophysical research in vision, touch and
multi-sensory integration. How does the brain combine different senses
to produce a coherent, unified percept of the world? This line of
research is part of an ongoing collaboration with Justin Harris
and Colin Clifford
from the University of Sydney. |
The
incredulity of saint Thomas
Caravaggio (1571-1610)
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| Another line of research involves recording
single neurons from the median nerve of awake, neurologically normal human participants (microneurography), while they engage in a psychophysical task. The perceptual judgments obtained concurrently with neuronal recording offers
unique opportunities to make direct comparisons between the performance
of single neurons and that of the subject. This line of research is in
collaboration with Ingvars
Birznieks from the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, and Justin
Harris
and Colin Clifford
from the University of Sydney. |
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