Principal Investigator: Peter Tse
The Neural Basis of Form Analysis in the Motion Pathway: Single-Unit Recording and Monkey fMRI Studies
This proposal is for three years of postdoctoral research and training at the Max-Planck- Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tubingen Germany to begin September 15, 1998, under the supervision of Professor Nikos Logothetis. Professor Logothetis has invited me to his lab with enthusiasm for the projects outlined here, and has generously offered to teach me two challenging techniques, monkey fMRI and single/multi-unit recording from neurons in the monkey visual cortex. My goal is to extend the human psychophysical research program that I have developed as a graduate student by observing brain tissue functioning at both macroscopic and microscopic levels of detail. While this is very different from the psychophysics I have been trained to do these past five years at Harvard, I look forward to the challenge of expanding my knowledge and skills using neuroscience techniques, and will devote all my energies to the task. Professor Logothetis predicts that it will take me at least a year to get up and running using these two techniques and to train a monkey.
It is my hope that Prof. Logothetis, his colleagues, and I will eventually
be able to uncover the neural substrate of form analysis in the visual
motion-processing pathway. We intend to use transformational apparent
motion as a probe. Unlike translational apparent motion, where an element
appears to jump to a new non-overlapping location in the visual field,
transformational apparent motion involves a smooth apparent shape change
between discretely presented shapes that overlap between initial and final
positions. Transformational apparent motion is an important new phenomenon
because it presents the first compelling evidence that form analysis plays
a central role in motion processing and motion perception. The history
of recent developments in this field will be summarized, and experiments
using unit recording and monkey fMRI techniques to locate areas of visual
cortex that perform this form analysis in the motion pathway will be described.
