Unit on Neurons, Circuits and Behavior

National Institute Of Mental Health

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

During the past year the lab has been functional at full capacity, other than limitations imposed by social distancing. We now have four functional physiology setups (including eye trackers, electrophysiology and optogenetic closed-loop control systems), all of them are actively producing data. Our projects can be divided into two main classes. One, we have named Perceptography is a novel approach to brain stimulation that includes about 75% of the lab activity. The goal of perceptography is to develop graphical representations of the state of visual perception during stimulation of various brain areas. In simple words, perceptography aims at taking pictures of the subjective state of visual perception when the brain is being locally stimulated in various high level visual areas. This is a critical step for developing effective visual prosthetics. Perceptography incorporates machine vision and adversarial artificial neural networks for developing images that are indistinguishable from the state of neural perturbation. In a closed-loop system, the artificial neural network accumulates an internal record of the behavioral choices of the animal to artificially synthesize images that appear more similar to the animal to the altered perceptual state induced by the neural perturbation. This was a dream in development last year, but now we have made significant progress in the area and we have three major projects covering various aspects of this general approach. Data collection for one of these projects in finished and we are preparing the manuscript. Out of the other two, one is still in data collection phase. The other was significantly slowed down following our lowering of space use due to COVID related social distancing rules, but we have now adapted our setup and started the process of data collection for it. The other class of projects in the lab involves measuring the effect of pharmacological neural perturbation in the face-selective parts of the inferior temporal cortex on eye movements and the behavioral pattern of visual search. We have collected the majority of data for this line of research, although data collection still continues. Given the novelty of our approach from both technical and theoretical aspects, our strategy for sharing these results with the scientific community is first to publish a methods paper describing the technical aspects of the approach, and then we will follow up with a sequence of scientific papers that include the findings of our main projects.