Past events

When a rat runs through a familiar environment, the hippocampus retrieves a previously stored spatial representation of the environment. When the environment is modified a new representation is seen, presumably corresponding to the hippocampus encoding the new information. I will present single unit data on examining the issue of how the “hippocampus decides” whether to retrieve an old representation or form a new representation.

Vibrissal information is relayed to the barrel cortex through at least two parallel pathways: a lemniscal pathway involving the ventroposterior medial thalamic nucleus (VPM), and a paralemniscal pathway involving the posteromedial nucleus (POm). I will review the role of the lemniscal system, focusing on the mechanisms by which VPM shapes the response properties of neurons in cortical barrels. I will argue that although analyses of these properties (e.g. receptive field structure and angular preference) have illuminated the process of input transformation in sensory pathways, they may have only limited ethological role. I will show that this lemniscal pathway is critical for temporal coding of somatosensory inputs. In the paralemniscal pathway, and in POm in particular, neurons respond poorly and unreliably to physiologically relevant stimuli. I will show that the GABAergic nucleus zona incerta (ZI) regulates POm activity is a state-dependent manner. This regulation is mediated by the cholinergic activating system, which enhances POm activity during states of arousal and vigilance. However, even in these states, POm neurons fail to reliably encode sensory inputs. I will show that POm is critically involved in coding noxious stimuli. Specifically, I will present evidence in support of the hypothesis that the phenomenon of central pain may be the result of suppressed inhibitory regulation of POm activity.

I will argue that living organisms can be characterized by their abilities to exchange information with their environment through sensing and acting. Moreover, the optimal interaction of an organism with its environment is determined by the information it can extract and store from the past about the future of its environment, on multiple time scales. Its optimal achievable performance is therefore bounded by the predictive-information of the environment, in some analogy with the entropy and channel-capacity bounds in Shannon's theory of communication. In that sense, life utilizes the predictability of its environment and act in order to increase its predictive capacity. This conceptual and quantitative framework can allow us to design and analyze experiments in neuroscience in a new way. I will discuss some recent applications to auditory and motor physiology.

Accumulating psychophysical and physiological evidence suggest the involvement of early visual areas in the process of visual integration and specifically in local facilitation of proximal and collinear stimuli. To investigate the early integration mechanisms at the population level, we performed voltage-sensitive dye imaging that is highly sensitive to subthreshold population activity, and imaged from the primary visual cortex (V1) and extrastriate cortex (V2) of a behaving monkey. The animal was trained on a simple fixation task while presented with collinear or non-collinear patterns of small gratings, Gabors or short oriented bars. Facilitation in terms of increased amplitude activity at the corresponding retinotopic site of the target was observed for low contrast targets presented as part of collinear or non-collinear pattern. The facilitation effect and its time course depended on the target flanker separation distance, suggesting the role of horizontal connections. Next, we compared the dynamics of cortical response. We found that the time course of responses increased faster in the collinear pattern as compared with the non-collinear pattern. Finally, to study synchronization, we calculated the spatial correlation of pixels at the target location and found that correlation was higher for the collinear pattern, suggesting that the neuronal code for collinear versus non-collinear pattern may be carried by synchronization and response dynamics rather than simply maximal amplitude of response. These results suggest that neuronal population activity in area V1 is involved in local visual integration processes, and specifically in the increased sensitivity for low-contrast visual stimuli surrounded by high contrast flankers. In the second part of my talk I will discuss repeating spatio-precise spatio-temporal patterns. Numerous studies of neuronal coding have reported precise time relations among spikes in cortical neurons. Here our main goal was to study whether information processing in the cortex involves precise spatio-temporal patterns and to detect and characterize those patterns among neuronal populations exploiting voltage-sensitive dye imaging (VSDI) in visual cortical areas of a fixating monkey. Our preliminary results demonstrate that spatio-temporal patterns do exist above chance level (p<0.0001). The spatial characteristics of those patterns are consistent with physiological studies regarding the interplay between different visual areas, and the temporal characteristics show that the majority of the patterns appear in a range of 10-20ms apart