Grant: Project Grant

Our world is composed of things: trees and buildings, cars and sidewalks, people and pets, desks and pens. One of the most important jobs for our visual system is to parse the world into its building blocks - objects. Indeed, our brain dedicates a large amount of space to visual object recognition. Years of work in humans and non-human primates have identified the 'ventral visual stream' - a set of cortical brain areas extending from primary visual cortex towards the temporal lobe - as a crucial system for enabling visual object recognition. However, the algorithms that the brain uses to enable objects to be recognized in the world remain poorly understood. Fortunately advances over the last years in neuroscience techniques mean it is now increasingly possible to record responses from countless neurons in vivo and manipulate neuronal activity with high spatial and temporal precision all while performing complex behavioral tests. Unfortunately, many of the most cutting-edge approaches are mostly restricted to use in mice, and our understanding of visual object recognition and 'ventral stream' processing is very limited in rodents. As such, here we propose a host of experiments to provide significant insights into visual object processing in the mouse brain, that should open the door for us and others to utilize this powerful animal model system for significantly enhancing our knowledge related to how the brain encodes visual objects.