Speaker
Description
How does the brain transform sensory input into perceptual decisions? In this talk, I will present work from my lab addressing this question at multiple levels of the cortical hierarchy, combining large-scale population recordings, optogenetic manipulations, and behavioral tasks. I will begin with the primary visual cortex: our data reveal encoding that extends well beyond classical visual tuning — yet the functional significance of this non-visual information remains unclear. Moving upstream, higher-order areas exhibit rich, multiplexed representations of sensory, motor, and decision-related variables, but the link between these neuronal representations and behavioural output remains unresolved. I will then present preliminary results challenging canonical accounts of sensory tuning and sensorimotor transformation in the visual system, pointing toward a more dynamic and context-dependent picture than standard hierarchical models predict. Together, these findings paint a picture of the distributed cortical network for visual processing and decision making that raises as many questions as it answers — and reveals how little we still know about the neural mechanisms of perception.