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

奖励是我们做出决定的关键驱动力。具有更大奖励价值的感官刺激吸引了我们更多的注意力，使我们的感知和感官产生偏差。我的目标是研究初级视觉皮层（大脑中视觉处理的第一阶段之一）如何在决策过程中过滤传入的信息。首先，我将研究如何学习视觉刺激的奖励值可以重新组织神经元之间的连接，即大脑的基本工作单位，在老鼠的视觉皮层。其次，我的目标是确定奖励环境如何影响视觉加工。奖励环境对我们的选择至关重要，因为在决策过程中最重要的是每个选择相对于其他选择的价值。我将运用神经生理学和建模技术的结合来回答上述关于健康和精神分裂症的问题，精神分裂症是一种与异常奖励处理相关的精神疾病

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