Topic: visual stimulus

Any sensory experience of the world, from the touch of a caress to the smile on our friend’s face, is embedded in time and it is often associated with the perception of the flow of it. The perception of time is therefore a peculiar sensory experience built without dedicated sensors. How the perception of time and the content of a sensory experience interact to give rise to this unique percept is unclear. A few empirical evidences show the existence of this interaction, for example the speed of a moving object or the number of items displayed on a computer screen can bias the perceived duration

I will discuss the mechanisms that determine whether a weak visual stimulus will reach consciousness or not. If the stimulus is simple, early visual cortex acts as a relay station that sends the information to higher visual areas. If the stimulus arrives at a minimal strength, it will be stored in working memory and can be reported. However, during more complex visual perceptions, which for example depend on the segregation of a figure from the background, early visual cortex’ role goes beyond a simply relay. It now acts as a cognitive blackboard and conscious perception depends on it. Our res

To make judgments, brain must be able to infer the state of the world based on often incomplete and ambiguous evidence. To probe neural circuits that perform the computations underlying such judgments, we developed a behavioral task for mice that required them to detect sustained increases in the speed of a continuously varying visual stimulus. In this talk, I will present evidence that the responses of secondary motor cortex to stimulus fluctuations in this task are consistent with updates of the animal’s state of belief that the change has occurred. These results establish a framework for me