Location

Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) Suddath Room (1128)
Other/Miscellaneous
Public

Joseph Del Rosario

BME PhD Defense Presentation

Date: 2023-08-10
Time: 1:00 pm ET
Location / Meeting Link: Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience (IBB) Suddath Room (1128); https://emory.zoom.us/j/99744167871

Committee Members:
Bilal Haider, PhD (Advisor); Garrett Stanley, PhD; Annabelle Singer, PhD; Samuel Sober, PhD; Peter Wenner, PhD


Title: Patterns of perception and performance across the visual cortex.

Abstract:
Our behavior depends upon sensing the world. Interpreting and comprehending these sensations is the cognitive act of perception. Perception is thought to rely on the coordination between excitatory and inhibitory neurons within and across different brain regions. Critically, sensory perception is constantly fluctuating, but the neural mechanisms driving changes are difficult to identify, since they require precise measurement of neural activity during perception. It is important to understand how neural mechanisms underlie perception and its fluctuations because dysfunction in these processes could explain sensory perceptual deficits that are common in many neurological conditions, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD, a condition affecting 1 in 36 people). In this thesis, I explore these topics by recording electrical neural activity in visual cortical brain regions of mice while they simultaneously perform a visual perception task. First, I establish neural signatures of cortical activity in the primary visual cortex (V1) that correspond with the accuracy of perceptual performance. Second, in a mouse model of ASD, I identify V1 neural activity deficits which predict impairments of visual perception. Third, using neuron-specific manipulations, I determine how different inhibitory neurons can distinctly transform perceptual sensitivity. Lastly, I explore the role of different cortical higher visual areas (HVAs) for visual perception. Together, this work provides greater insight for the cortical cell-types, activity patterns, and processing stages underlying visual perception and its impairments.