Past events

The human ventral stream consists of regions in the lateral and ventral aspects of the occipital and temporal lobes and is involved in visual recognition. One robust characteristic of selectivity in the adult human ventral stream is category selectivity. Category selectivity is manifested by both a regional preference to particular object categories, such as faces, places and bodyparts, as well as in specific (and reproducible) distributed response patterns across the ventral stream for different object categories. However, it is not well understood how experience modifies these representations and how do these representations come about throughout development. Here, I will describe two sets of experiments in which we addressed these important questions. First, I will describe experiments in adults in which we examined the effect of repetition on categorical responses in the ventral stream. Repeating objects decreases responses in the human ventral stream. However, repetition largely does not change the profile of category selectivity in the ventral stream, except for a place-selective region in the collateral sulcus in which long-lagged repetitions sharpened its responses. Second, I will describe experiments in which we examined changes in category selectivity throughout development from middle childhood (7-11 years), through adolescence (12-16) into adulthood. Surprisingly, we find that it takes more than a decade for the development of adult-like face and place-selective regions. In contrast, the lateral occipital object-selective region showed an adult-like profile by age 7. Finally, I will discuss the implications of these results on plasticity in the ventral stream and our theoretical models linking between fMRI measurements and the underlying neural mechanisms.

In 1979, Francis Crick delineated the major challenges facing neuroscience and called for a technology by which all neurons of just one type could be controlled, “leaving the others more or less unaltered”. A new set of technologies now called optogenetics, synthesizing microbial opsins and solid-state optics, has achieved the goal of millisecond-precision bidirectional control of defined cell types in freely behaving mammals. ChR2 was the first microbial opsin brought to neurobiology, where we initially found that ChR2-expressing neurons can fire blue light-triggered action potentials with millisecond precision, as a result of depolarizing cation flux, without addition of chemical cofactors; this approach has since proven versatile across a variety of preparations. Second, in work stimulated by the finding that the all-trans retinal chromophore required by microbial opsins appears already present within mammalian brains, so that no chemical cofactor need be supplied, we found that neurons targeted to express the light-activated chloride pump halorhodopsin from Natronomonas pharaonis (NpHR) can be hyperpolarized and inhibited from firing action potentials when exposed to yellow light in intact tissue and behaving animals; because of the excitation wavelength difference, the two optical gates can be simultaneously used in the same cells even in vivo5. Third, we employed genomic strategies to discover and adapt for neuroscience a third major optogenetic tool, namely a cation channel (VChR1) with action spectrum significantly redshifted relative to ChR2, to allow tests of the combinatorial interaction of cell types in circuit computation or behavior. Fourth, we have developed genetic targeting tools for versatile use of microbial opsins with existing resources including cell type-specific promoter fragments or Cre-LoxP mouse driver lines suitable for a wide variety of neuroscience investigations. Finally, we have developed integrated fiberoptic and solid-state optical approaches to provide the complementary technology to allow specific cell types, even deep within the brain, to be controlled in freely behaving mammals. Prof. Deisseroth is hosted by the students of the Department of Neurobiology, as a part of the departmental students-invited visiting scientist program.