Descrição
The long-term goal of this project is to insert our Graduate Program in Physiology and Pharmacology at UFMG into an internationally competitive network of expertise devoted to the investigation of cellular and circuit mechanisms of visual cortex function. Towards that goal, we intend to foster a sustainable scientific collaboration with Yves Frégnac, a world renowned cortical neurophysiologist. An incipient, yet promisingly effective, collaboration already exists between Yves Frégnac and one of our faculty members, Jerome Baron. We foresee the SPECIAL VISITING RESEARCHER fellowship as a great opportunity to strengthen this collaborative effort by facilitating the development of a joint research project on the basis of reciprocity, best efforts, mutual benefits and frequent interactions. The overall objectives of the project can be summarised as follows: 1) Foremost, we want to conduct an experimental study which will quantify the degree of nonlinearities of cell receptive fields in the owl visual wulst as a function of the spatiotemporal feature compositionality of different artificial and natural stimuli. Particular emphasis will be given on testing hypotheses which posit that the brain effectively processes the statistical regularities of retinal images generated by active visual inspection of complex natural environments according to network-regulated adaptive optimisation principles. The experimental approach to be used in this study will try and match as closely as possible that employed by Yves Fregnac s team in a recent work (Fournier et al., 2011, Nature Neuroscience, 14, 1053-62;; Boudot et al., Frontiers in Neural Circuits, accepted with minor revisions). Thus, comparative inferences between owl and cat primary visual forebrains will be able to be drawn with more precision;; 2) We also plan to set-up, within the research facilities of the Brazilian group, an intracellular recording system allowing the acquisition of sub- and supra-threshold membrane potentials from intact small-to- medium sized animals. For this, we will capitalise on the technical expertise of the French group;; 3) Efforts will be made to establish a unifying framework for data acquisition and analysis software development in order to respond more efficiently to the experimental needs of project partners;; 4) Last, but not least, we pledge our commitment to educational initiatives that will familiarise and capacitate both students and research staff in all the different conceptual and methodological aspects of the proposed lines of research.
