INT'L GUEST SPEAKER- Professor Stefan Treue PhD, Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center, Göttingen: ‘Visual cortical area V5/MT - a prototype for shaping sensation into perception’
Area V5/MT in primate visual cortex is arguably the best understood area in primate extrastriate visual cortex in terms of its representation of the incoming (bottom-up) sensory information. MT is considered to be of critical importance for our ability to perceive the visual motion patterns in our environment.

This level of understanding of the neural representation of sensory information in one cortical area is an excellent basis for investigating the top-down influences exerted by various types of attention onto sensory information processing.

The talk will give an overview of the multitude of attentional effects that have been discovered with this focused approach, ranging from effects of spatial, feature-based and object-based attention on target and distractor stimuli encoding to multiplicative and non-multiplicative modulations of tuning curves, perisaccadic effects, as well as effects on the representation of change events in the environment and neural responses that are not modulated by attention.
From these investigations a clear pattern emerges that turns MT into a model area for the interaction of sensory (bottom-up) signals with cognitive (top-down) modulatory influences that characterises visual perception. These findings also document how this interaction enables visual cortex to actively generate a neural representation of the environment that combines the high-performance sensory periphery with selective modulatory influences for producing an “integrated saliency map’ of the environment.
Date: 10 February 2017, 13:00 (Friday, 4th week, Hilary 2017)
Venue: Sherrington Building, off Parks Road OX1 3PT
Venue Details: DPAG, Large Lecture Theatre, Sherrington Building, off South Parks and Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3PT - 01865 272500
Speaker: Professor Stefan Treue PhD (Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory, German Primate Center, Göttingen )
Organising department: Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics (DPAG)
Organiser: Sarah Noujaim (University of Oxford, Department of Physiology Anatomy and Genetics)
Organiser contact email address: sarah.noujaim@dpag.ox.ac.uk
Host: Professor Andrew Parker (Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics)
Part of: DPAG Head of Department Seminar Series
Topics:
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Sarah Noujaim