Our lab studies the cerebral cortex, with the goal of finding out how neurons communicate information about the visual world. We use microelectrode recordings to listen to individual neurons as they talk to their neighbors. These conversations are a type of code, in effect the software that makes the brain’s hardware capable of vision. Part of this code can be understood in a straightforward way if one knows the statistics of the visual input; the relationship between these statistics and neural activity can be determined with computational methods.

One of the goals of this research is to develop a quantitative understanding of how these different aspects of neural activity relate to memory, perception and behavior. We are particularly interested in the ways in which subjects use eye movements to scan their surroundings.