Anne Churchland, PhD
Professor of Neurobiology
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA
Host(s): Matthew Whiteway (Postdoc)
The intersection of vision and movements in the mammalian brain
Human and animal movements are often viewed as a nuisance that “muddies the waters” of efforts to link visual inputs to cognitive processes like decision-making. Such movements are often prevented via hardware, “regressed out” in analysis or simply ignored. However, in naturalistic circumstances, animals and humans make frequent movements during perceptual and cognitive tasks. These include large movements that optimally position the sensor (e.g., the fovea), or smaller, high frequency movements that add spectrotemporal content to a stimulus. Importantly, recent work has demonstrated that movements impact neural activity in early sensory areas, even in experts engaged making visual decisions. In mice, cell-type specific measurements have demonstrated that movements modulate not only neurons that project corticocortically, but also neurons that project to subcortical targets, suggesting that cortical neurons broadcast movement signals throughout the brain. Further, movements modulate neural activity in both head-fixed and freely moving rodents, arguing that movements shape activity in multiple contexts. These observations raise major outstanding questions about the nature of the movement signals, and they extent to which they reflect altered sensory inputs, efference copies, or underlying latent states. Emerging work using a novel, visual accumulation of evidence task that recruits and requires primary and secondary visual cortices begins to shed light on these questions. Taken together, this growing body of observations about the intersection of vision and movements calls for a new framework that acknowledges the diverse ways in which dynamic interactions with the environment can benefit both sensory processing and decision-making.
Relevant Publications:
Single-trial neural dynamics are dominated by richly varied movements
Tuesdays@10 is a signature Zuckerman Institute initiative that aims to expose researchers at all levels to high-quality science and stimulate scientific discourse. The speakers featured in this series represent various fields and techniques in neuroscience, and include invited guests of the Columbia Neuroscience Seminars, the Zuckerman Institute's Local Circuits Affiliates Program, and other special seminar series through a combined, collaborative effort of one or more of the following: Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Center for Precision Psychiatry, the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.
More information and a full schedule can be found here.