The doors of perception: selective processing of behaviourally relevant information during sensory-guided decision-making

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Rewards are the key driving forces of our decisions. Sensory stimuli with greater reward value engage more of our attention, biasing our perception and senses. I aim to investigate how the primary visual cortex, one of the first stages of visual processing in the brain, filters incoming information in decision-making. Firstly, I will examine how learning the reward value of a visual stimulus can re-organise the connections between neurons, i.e. the basic working units of the brain, in the mouse visual cortex. Secondly, I aim to determine how the reward context influences visual processing. Reward context is crucial for our choices because what matters most in decisionmaking is the value of each option relative to those of the alternatives. I will apply a combination of neurophysiological and modelling techniques to answer the above questions in health and schizophrenia, a psychiatric disease associated with abnormal reward processing