Laboratory of Vision and Cognition - Honours projects available in 2009
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.
- Constraints on information flow through the visual thalamus
Supervisor + contact details:
- Dr Samuel Solomon
The optic nerve consists hundred of thousands of axons that form several parallel pathways, the main ones coursing through the thalamus to primary visual cortex; from this the brain must interpret the outside world. What information about the outside world is provided by the signals of neurons that provide the input to visual cortex? How much of the signals provided by an individual neuron are redundant, present in the signals of other neurons? Your project will use extracellular recordings from the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus, simultaneously recording from multiple electrodes, to determine this.
- Structure-function relationships in the visual thalamus in mice
Supervisor + contact details:
- Dr Samuel Solomon
- Dr Aaron Camp
Your project will use in vitro patch-clamp methods to study the functional organisation of the visual pathway in mice. Possible projects include the interaction between excitatory and inhibitory inputs in determining signal transmission in the LGN; the relationship between the anatomical organisation of synaptic inputs on a dendritic tree and their functional impact on the generation of action potentials by LGN neurons; the role of neuromodulators in filtering retinal signals on their way to the visual cortex.
