Grant: Project Grant

As you are reading this text, neurons in your brain coordinate their activities, thereby enabling you to correctly perceive and interpret the visual input forming on your retina. Our senses play a primordial role in enabling us to interact with our environment on our day to day lives. This is however not the case for a significant portion of the population suffering from sensory disorders. In fact, Autism spectrum disorders are associated with symptoms indicating impaired sensory processing. Growing evidence shows that perception of the sensory environment relies on the coordinated firing of large groups of neurons within our brain: this is known as population coding. What complicates our understanding of population coding is that the neural activities are not independent of one another but are rather related (i.e., "correlated"). Neural correlations have been observed across multiple brain areas but how they impact coding remains largely controversial. This is in part due to the fact that they change depending on sensory input as well as the brain's internal state (e.g., attention). The primary goal of this research project is to understand the functional role of neural correlations in sensory coding. Our preliminary data shows that correlations can vary dynamically as a function of behaviorally relevant stimulus attributes, thereby providing information. Our project aims at understanding the nature of the underlying mechanisms. This research will provide key knowledge into how neural populations can encode sensory input, which in turn will lead to better understanding of how changes in brain architecture can lead to pathologies and better treatment options for patients.