Cosyne 2007 Workshops
February 26-27, 2007
The Canyons, Utah
Workshop Title
Active Sensation and Natural Scenes in the Vibrissa Sensory System
Organizer(s)
Christopher Moore (MIT): cim@mit.edu
Garrett Stanley (Harvard): gstanley@deas.harvard.edu
Abstract
The vibrissa sensory system is a key mammalian model for studying sensory encoding. As a high-resolution system that is neither ‘visual’ nor explicitly ‘auditory,’ it provides an ideal counterpoint for examining principles of sensory representation, and how they do or do not generalize.
The majority of studies of this system have presented artificial tactile stimuli, passively applied to one or two vibrissae as discrete steps. This context is radically different from what is known of the perceptual engagement of the animal, which requires active sensation (typically ‘whisking’ against a surface) and contact across multiple vibrissae in distinct spatio-temporal patterns.
This workshop will focus on a variety of new directions in the study of this system. We will focus on understanding the information that is ethologically relevant to the animal, how features are represented and transformed through the system, how tactile information is mechanically transduced at the periphery, and the role of the animal’s own behavior in influencing these percepts. Participants will be encouraged to discuss these issues broadly, with an emphasis on comparison with alternative sensory pathways.
Speakers
| Ehud Ahissar | Summary of the ’state of the field’, leading open discussion of future directions |
| Dan Barth (CU-Boulder) | Coincidence detection in SI barrel neurons |
| Noah Cowan (Johns Hopkins) | A ”robotics-inspired” approach to understanding sensorimotor control systems: Cockroach locomotion and navigation |
| Mitra Hartmann (JPL) | Quantifying spatiotemporal patterns of input across the vibrissal array |
| Dan Hill (UCSD) | Muscular drive of whisking, and representation and control of whisking by cortex |
| Christopher Moore (MIT) | The embodied mind: The role of hemodynamics in activesensation |
| Jason Ritt (MIT) | Body, brain and choice in sensory computation |
| Garrett Stanley | Sensory processing in the non-stationary natural world |
| Jason Wolfe | Direct measurement of whisker resonance during active whisking in awake, behaving rats |
