Udo Ernst
Wednesday 3rd December 2014
Time: 4pm
B10 Basement Floor Seminar Room
Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR
Cortical computation goes critical
Critical dynamics and power laws in avalanches of neural activity are observed in different brain areas and different species ranging from rats to human subjects. These critical states have been suggested to be beneficial for information representation and processing, but their role in active cortical computation has yet not been explored. In my talk, I will present a general framework for cortical information processing in critical networks, and apply this idea to contour integration in visual scenes. Indeed performance of the model is maximized near the critical state. In addition, it provides a natural explanation for the ambiguity between the experimentally observed small variations in rate and the high perceptual performance. Comparison of model dynamics to local field potentials from awake behaving macaque monkeys engaged in a demanding, delayed-match-to-sample task indicates that also the 'real' cortex operates near a critical state.
Short vita:
1994-2000: Diploma and PhD in Physics (University of Frankfurt and Max-Planck-Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization in Göttingen, Germany)
2000-2010: Postdoc at University of Bremen, Germany and at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France
2010: Bernstein Award for Computational Neuroscience
2010-today: Independent research group leader at University of Bremen, Germany