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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