The influence of task context on neural population activity during natural scene discrimination

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT Environmental context heavily influences our visual perception, allowing us to extract relevant information from the overwhelming amount of sensory input found in the natural world. This is particularly important when we need to discriminate sensory inputs in our natural environment, such as finding a friend in a crowd. Context can be separated into two components that could affect our ability to make discriminations: how familiar we are with the visual input, and what we expect the input to be. Studies investigating the effects of contextual modulation have primarily assessed the activity of individual neurons using only a few simplified stimuli in tasks where these two components can’t be separated. This greatly limits our ability to generalize these findings to natural environments where familiarity and expectation influence neural population activity and shape our perceptual abilities. The overarching goal of this proposal is to investigate the effects of task context on shaping neural population responses and behavioral performance. In the first specific aim, we will assess the effect of modulating stimulus familiarity on neural activity and behavior. We hypothesize that increased stimulus familiarity improves our perceptual abilities by modulating population activity to enhance the encoding of the stimulus. In the second specific aim, we will assess the effect of modulating the expectation of how a stimulus will change on neural activity and behavior. We hypothesize that expectation modifies population activity to benefit the current task context and improve behavioral performance. Our strategy to employ population-level measures will reveal signals hidden from analyses that only measure single neurons. The results of this study will establish how neural population activity is tailored to different aspects of an environmental context to improve our visual perception in a naturalistic environment. This will enhance our understanding of the basic neural mechanisms affecting visual perception in a non-disease state, making it possible to progress in developing treatments for disorders where visual perception is awry. In addition to an exciting and innovative research project, this proposal outlines a comprehensive training plan that will provide me with essential training to advance towards a career as an independent researcher. This plan emphasizes 1) gaining a deeper conceptual understanding of the neural underpinnings of visual perception, 2) learning the necessary experimental techniques and computational analyses required to relate neuronal population activity to behavior, 3) improving scientific communication skills, 4) broadening my scientific network, and 5) providing me with opportunities to mentor others. The training will be conducted under the guidance of Dr. Matthew Smith, an expert in relating neural population activity to visual perception, at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University which together provide an outstanding neuroscience community rich in world-renowned faculty spanning every domain of neuroscience, extensive interdisciplinary research and collaboration, and an impressive track-record for training future independent investigators.