Christopher Harvey

Wednesday 2nd May 2018

Time:4.00pm

Ground Floor Seminar Room

25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG

New approaches to probe computations in neural circuits with all-optical technology

I will present new worked aimed at identifying computations performed in local neuronal populations. We have developed a method based on two-photon imaging and two-photon optogenetics to measure the causal, functional connectivity in a population of neurons with characterized activity patterns and tuning. We call this method influence mapping – a measure of how one neuron’s spiking causally affects spiking in its neighbors. We have applied this method in mouse V1 to reveal new functional relationships between orientation tuned neurons. I will also discuss applications of influence mapping to the study of computations for flexible sensorimotor decision-making.