RESEARCH
PERCEPTION:
- Processing of social signals (faces, voices, body parts, and gestures)
- Functional organization of the temporal lobe
MEMORY:
- Neural ensemble changes with learning
- The role of sleep oscillations in memory consolidation
INTERACTIONS:
- Relation between ongoing brain states and stimulus-driven activity
- Influences of emotional states, memory, and saccadic eye movements on perception
Our overarching goal is to understand how cell assemblies are created, maintained,
and modified in the neocortical mantle. This pursuit has pushed us towards the use of ethologically relevant stimuli and testing paradigms,
since we would like to tap into what brains are doing and not just what they can do.
We also contrast stimulus-driven neural responses (reflecting a neural representation of objects in the environment)
with internally-generated responses (like memory traces), which involves recording spontaneous activity and activity during sleep.
While this places our research in fields as diverse as face perception, learning and plasticity, neural population coding,
and sleep, the projects listed above are interrelated and often are conducted within the same behavioral or electrophysiological recording sessions.
