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CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//PlanIt Purple//EN
BEGIN:VEVENT
STATUS:CONFIRMED
LAST-MODIFIED:20111207T131713
URL:
PRIORITY:0
CLASS:PUBLIC
UID:420246@northwestern.edu
SUMMARY:Robert Froemke\, PhD - NYU Langone Medical Center
DESCRIPTION:Long-term cortical synaptic plasticity improves sensory perceptionSynapses and receptive fields of the cerebral cortex are plastic. However\, changes to specific inputs must be coordinated within neural networks to ensure that excitability and feature selectivity are appropriately configured for perception of the sensory environment. I will discuss our recent work on long-term synaptic modifications of auditory cortical synapses\, induced by pairing sounds with activation of the cholinergic neuromodulatory system. Synaptic modifications were precisely orchestrated across entire receptive fields\, conserving mean excitation while reducing overall variance. Computational analysis indicated that decreased variability should increase detection and discrimination of near-threshold or previously imperceptible stimuli\, and we confirmed this psychophysically in behaving animals. I will also describe newer results comparing the effects of acetylcholine to another attention-related modulator\, noradrenalin. Our work indicates that direct modification of specific cortical inputs leads to wide-scale synaptic changes\, which collectively support improved sensory perception and enhanced behavioral performance. 
DTSTART:20120410T124500
DTEND:20120410T134500
CREATED:20110622T000000
DTSTAMP:20110622T000000
SEQUENCE:0
LOCATION:Evanston
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