Laboratory of Vision and Cognition - Honours projects available in 2010
An Honours project undertaken in this lab would be administered by the Discipline of Physiology.
Our research is concerned with how the brain analyses, and makes decisions about, the sensory information it receives. To understand this we study the visual system, the primary sense organ in primates, and the one that we know most about. In physiological experiments we characterise at the level of nerve cells the work done by the eye and visual cortex. In perceptual experiments we explore performance, and compare these observations with the physiological ones through quantitative analysis. We are part of the School of Medical Sciences and also invite interested students from, for example, the School of Psychology or School of Engineering, as long as you meet the criteria for acceptance to Honours here.
I encourage students to participate in any and all aspects of the lab's research, within a couple of months targeting a question you find interesting. The question can be novel or part of the ongoing research, as long as we can answer it.
The laboratory publishes in high quality journals (since 2001 articles have appeared in Nature, Neuron, The Journal of Neuroscience, The Journal of Physiology) and is committed to helping students do the same.
- Processing of motion by visual cortex
Supervisor + contact details:
- Dr Samuel Solomon
The middle-temporal (MT) area of visual cortex is specialised for the processing of motion in the visual world, and uses those signals to drive eye movements. The interested student will determine the robustness of the code for motion that MT provides, by measuring responses of single neurons to textures whose properties approximate those of natural visual images, and determining from those responses the minimally discriminable motion difference. The observations will be related to complementary behavioural work on humans.
- Large scale activity of neurons in visual cortex
Supervisor + contact details:
- Dr Samuel Solomon
We know a lot about the activity of single neurons in the visual system, but we know little about how they provide signals as populations. This work will utilise recordings from microelectrode arrays consisting 64 channels and implanted in ~ 1mm of visual cortex. The question will be how is the motion of an object decoded from a population of motion selective neurons. This project will require some competence in programming, preferably in the Matlab environment.
