Dan Butts
Harvard University

"Temporal hyperacuity": visual neuron function at millisecond time resolution

Tuesday 03rd of January 2006 at 04:00pm
5101 Tolman

Photoreceptors filter visual stimuli at relatively coarse time scales, resulting in a representation of the visual world that varies slowly compared to the temporal structure in the spike trains of downstream neurons. Such fine temporal structure is typically ignored, and is neither captured by most visual neuron models, nor characterized from a functional perspective. Using a combination of experiment and modeling, I will demonstrate how non-linear processing by LGN neurons creates fine temporal structure in neuronal responses, which serves to encode a significant fraction of information on millisecond time scales. Furthermore, I will suggest how this fine temporal information is useful for encoding spatial details of visual stimuli. Considering such "temporal hyperacuity" may be essential in understanding how visual stimuli are represented in downstream neurons and yield insight into neuronal processing in general.

Join Email List

You can subscribe to our weekly seminar email list by sending an email to majordomo@lists.berkeley.edu that contains the words subscribe redwood in the body of the message.
(Note: The subject line can be arbitrary and will be ignored)