Excitation and inhibition in visual processing

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Project Summary A fundamental goal of systems neuroscience is to describe how sensory inputs are integrated and guide an animal's behavior. To be able to integrate these inputs, early sensory systems have developed selectivities for specific stimulus features that allow them to analyze the inputs using these features as basis. A classic example is the emergence of orientation selectivity within the visual cortex (Hubel and Wiesel, 1962). Successive processing stages in the early visual system perform systematic transformations on the incoming inputs that enable them to be able to identify multiple aspects of the visual scene important for guiding an animal's behavior, including the location, shape, depth and motion of objects. While the unique feature selectivities emerging at different stages in visual processing are known to a certain extent, the nature and mechanisms of these sensory transformations less well-understood. We aim to uncover how disparate motion signals are integrated to produce a global percept of motion, and to understand the conditions in which such integration fails.