Animals live in a spatiotemporally complex sensory world, but current understanding of how the brain processes sensory information to mediate perception is based on highly simplified, isolated stimuli. This collaborative project will reveal how the brain’s cerebral cortex encodes and processes complex tactile (touch) stimuli, using the mouse whisker system as a model. Building on prior work in other species, we will identify the optimal single-whisker stimuli for cortical neurons, and determine how these single-whisker responses are integrated across whiskers and across time to build a neural representation of the complex tactile world.
UC PI:
Daniel Feldman
Department of Molecular & Cell Biology, UC Berkeley
French PI:
Daniel Shulz
Unité de Neuroscience, Information et Complexité, CNRS
