Research Summary
Functional organization of visual cortex
Research in my laboratory is concerned with understanding how circuits
in the visual cortex determine the ability of this structure to process
information. We work with freshwater turtles because the eye and brain
can be removed from these animals and maintained intact in an in vitro
preparation. We can, consequently, present visual information to the eye
of the preparation while recording from individual neurons in the cortex
using intracellular recording methods. One current line of work involves
characterizing the biophysical properties of each of the several types
of neurons in the cortex using a combination of anatomical, physiological
and compartmental modeling techniques. These studies are leading to an
understanding of the design features of the cortex at the circuit level,
focusing on aspects of cortical design such as the relative timing of excitation
and inhibition in the cortex. A second line of work involves using a large
scale model of the cortex (comprising about 750 cells) to understand waves
of activity that propagate across the cortex when visual stimuli are present.
Novel data analysis techniques are being used to show that the spatiotemporal
dynamics of these waves code information, such as the position of a stimulus
in visual space. |
Some Selected Papers
Ulinski, P.S., E.G. Jones and A. Peters (1999). Models of Cortical Circuits,
Plenum/Kluwer Academic. Cerebral Cortex, Vol. 13.
Colombe, J.B. and Ulinski, P.S. (1999). Temporal dispersion windows
in cortical neurons. J. Computational Neuroscience,
7: 71-87.
Mancilla, J.G. and Ulinski, P.S. (2001). Role of GABAA-mediated inhibition
in controlling the responses of regular spiking cells in turtle visual
cortex. Visual Neuroscience, 18: 1-16.
Updated 9/17/04. |
