Description:

The Department of Physiology welcomes, Arbora Resulaj, Ph.D., with University of California, SF

The visual world changes quickly and continuously. Thus, the rapid detection of relevant features in the visual world is essential for an organism to cope with such ongoing changes. For example, humans are quick at identifying specific features, like an animal or a face, in the visual scene. The extraction of such features, however, is thought to require the sequential activation of many brain areas. This implies that each involved brain area must process information over a brief period of time. In this talk, I will address two fundamental questions. First, how long does it take a visual area in the mammalian cortex to process enough information for the organism to make a decision about the visual scene? Second, how is the visual scene represented in the visual cortex during this time period? I will address these questions in the mouse using optogenetics, electrophysiology, lesions and behavior, and show that the earliest activity in visual cortex is sufficient to extract key features of the visual scene for the organism to make an appropriate decision.