Föreläsningar och seminarier Cognitive Neuroscience Club med Peter Kok: "The neural circuit underlying subjective perception"

"The neural circuit underlying subjective perception"

Föreläsare/talare

Peter Kok, Principal Research Fellow vid Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, Storbritannien

Abstrakt (på engelska)

The way we perceive the world is strongly influenced by our expectations about what we are likely to see at any given moment. However, the neural mechanisms by which the brain achieves this remarkable feat have yet to be established. In order to understand the neural mechanisms underlying the interplay between sensory inputs and prior expectations, we need to investigate the way these signals flow through the cortical layers. Until recently, it was not possible to do this in non-invasive studies of humans, because the typical voxel size in fMRI is bigger than the full thickness of the cortex (2-2.5mm). I will discuss recent work in which we met this challenge by using fMRI at ultra-high field (7T) to obtain BOLD signals at very high resolution (0.8mm) to disambiguate signals from the different cortical layers. This approach has allowed us to reveal the neural circuitry underlying effects of expectation and subjective perception. I will also discuss the role of the hippocampus as a potential generator of top-down expectation effects in visual cortex. Together, this work aims to shed new light on the neural circuitry underlying our perception of the world.