Title: " Precise Connections and Precise Timing in the Visual System"

Clay Reid

Department of Neurobiology

Harvard Medical School

Abstract:

I will talk about mechanisms by which visual information is transformed in the pathway from retina, to the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus (LGN), and finally to layer 4 of primary visual cortex. The broad goal of my research is to understand this pathway at two levels: function and mechanism. The main question is: what is the relationship between a neuron's function (its receptive field) and the set of inputs it receives? We address this problem by recording from neurons at multiple levels in the visual system and using automated receptive-field mapping techniques and cross-correlation analysis. Our main findings are that connections along the retino-geniculo-cortical pathway are extremely precise, and that the timing of action potentials can be important at the msec time-scale. New directions in the laboratory will be briefly discussed: (1) behavioral modulation of visual responses in the alert primate; and (2) calcium imaging of single-neuron visual responses in vivo.