The role of spontaneous body movements for neural processing in the visual cortex in sighted and blind subjects: a cross-species comparison
The laboratory of Prof. Bridge in Oxford uses multi-modal MRI to understand the pathways in the human visual system, and how they are affected by vision loss early or late in life.
The laboratory of Dr. Nienborg at the NIH combines behavior, neurophysiology, and videography in mammalian animal models to better understand how the visual system processes information depending on the animal’s behavioral and cognitive state.
Visual processing during natural behavior requires subjects to distinguish between changes in visual information caused by a subject’s own body movements (e.g. by walking along a street), and those caused by changes in the external world (e.g. a car driving by). How the brain achieves this is fundamental to understanding visual perception. Moreover, the degree to which their own body movements affect processing in visual cortex in normally sighted and blind subjects has direct implications for the development of neural prostheses targeting the visual cortex.
The project will have two objectives:
- Identify how spontaneous body movements affect processing in the visual cortex in a mammalian animal model during head-free, naturalistic behavior.
- Compare the modulations in the visual cortex by a subject’s own body movements in sighted and blind human participants.
This project will allow students to learn wireless electrophysiological recordings in mammalian animal models (e.g. non-human primates or a highly visual rodent species) combined with videography during naturalistic behavior. Students will also be able to learn how to leverage recent machine learning approaches for the analysis of the video and neural data. Additionally, students will have the opportunity to learn how to acquire and analyze functional MRI data in sighted and blind human subjects, using a variety of tools.