July 18 – Outside speaker: Matt Whiteway (Associate Research Scientist, Zuckerman Institute): Deep learning tools for behavior video analysis (Gonda 1357 at 1pm)
May 18 — Outside speaker: Ben Scholl (Assistant Professor, Neuroscience, U Penn) The population within a neuron: synaptic building blocks of cortical selectivity
May 11 — Outside speaker: Karolina Socha (Post-doc, Cortex lab, UCL) Exploring the contribution of early sensory areas to decision-making behaviors in mice
May 4 — postdoc candidate talk (Frye lab): Matt Trachick (University of Akron, Ohio) Critical timepoints in mouse visual development
April 20 – Greg Field (Associate Professor, UCLA): Metamosaics: new principles for spatial sampling and the origins of cell type diversity
March 23 – Outside speaker: Joseph Wekselblatt (Caltech, CA)
The northern tree shrew (Tupia belangeri): Elucidating a complex visual system using functional ultrasound imaging, electrophysiology, and non-invasive viral delivery
March 9 — Outside speaker: Jake Yates (Assistant Professor, Optometry and Vision Science, UC-Berkeley) Neural mechanisms of active visual processing
Feb 23 — Foundations of Vision session: Models of visual neurons (linear, linear-nonlinear, GLMs, and reverse correlation)
Feb 9 — Paper presentation: Penny Chen (PhD student, Huk Lab), will present Leinweber at al, (2017): A Sensorimotor Circuit in Mouse Cortex for Visual Flow Predictions
January 26, 2023 – Mario Dipoppa will present his latest work on V1, “Adaptation shapes the representational geometry in V1 to encode the statistics of the environment”.
January 12, 2023 — Foundations of Vision session: The Psychometric Function – Signal detection/diffusion models, curve fitting, parameter interpretation. Background reading: [Palmer, Huk, & Shadlen 2005, The effect of stimulus strength on the speed and accuracy of a perceptual decision]
December 1, 2022 – Letizia Ye and John Zhou, from the Churchland lab, led the discussion on Abdolrahmani et al. 2021 – Attention separates sensory and motor signals in the mouse visual cortex
In this paper, the Benucci lab demonstrates that cognitive and motor signals impact visual processing in a state-dependent manner. They asked how visual, motor and cognitive signals interact with each other for reliable visual behavior. To explore this, they recorded neural activity from dorso-parietal networks using widefield imaging while mice performed a visual discrimination task. Using a generalized linear model (GLM), they discovered that visual and motor signals show amplified nonlinear interactions which depended on the animals’ attentional state, and increased the discriminability of these visuo-motor signals. This compelling paper provides critical insight into how internal states may shape the processing of visual input to guide goal-oriented decisions.
Letizia Ye and John Zhou
October 13, 2022 – Declan Rowley, post-doc in the Huk lab, led the discussion on Franke et al. 2022 – State-dependent pupil dilation rapidly shifts visual feature selectivity
This paper describes how V1’s representation of color and form are rapidly tuned by pupil dilation to match behavioural demands. We decided to discuss this paper because it highlights the functional interaction of behaviour and vision, and demonstrates the power of combining precise receptive field characterisation with simultaneous measurements of behavioural state. To achieve this they trained deep neural network models that use both the visual input and the animal’s behaviour to jointly predict the neural response allowing for clear dissections of their interactions. Finally, it serves as a touchpoint for discussing how classical vision science can be rigorously connected to ecologically valid contexts (a major theme in the Huk lab).
Declan Rowley
September 15, 2022 – Joao Couto, post-doc in the Churchland lab, led the discussion on Murakami et al. 2022 – Modular strategy for development of the hierarchical visual network in mice
Vision and Perception Club 