Orientation discrimination

How the activity of sensory neurons supports perceptual decisions remains one of the central questions of systems neuroscience. Two primary frameworks guide the field’s thinking on this question. One framework, guided by ideas of information maximization, redundancy reduction, and efficient coding, focuses on the decision-related information represented by neural responses and how it is extracted from sensory populations. In another framework, based on the Bayesian brain hypothesis, sensory responses represent posterior beliefs about the outside world, which then guide decision-making. Interes

Postsynaptic density protein 95 (PSD-95) is an important signalling scaffold of the PSD of excitatory synapses. We have previously shown that PSD-95 dependent silent synapse maturation closes the critical period (CP) for ocular dominance plasticity in mouse V1: PSD-95 KO mice display both functional & structural hallmarks of CP plasticity and synapses cannot properly stabilize. Since the development of binocularity happens during the CP, we hypothesized that PSD-95 KOs should display compromised binocular integration. To test this hypothesis, we performed both behavioural experiments and m

…a progressive 3-stimuli touchscreen orientation discr

…KO mice, and results in compromised orientation discrimination (Favaro et al 2018, PLosBiol 16:e2006838). We therefore analysed whether orexin KO modifies AMPA-currents in V1 and causes similar visual deficits.First, we quantified AMPA-recepto

Bayesian models have been successful at accounting for human and animal behavior, yet to what degree they can also explain neural activity is still an open question. While decoding approaches that link neural variability to behavioral uncertainty provide some evidence, stronger tests have tried to link posterior beliefs about specific latent variables in a generative model to neural responses. On one hand, the specificity of the resulting predictions is desirable since it allows us to decide which of the infinitely many parameterizations of the task model (ideal observer) is more closely align

…participants are asked to perform an orientation discrimination task, followed by a confidence judgment.