Unit on Sensory Coding and Neural Ensembles

Head: Mark A. Stopfer

All animals need to know what is going on in the world around them; thus, brain mechanisms have evolved to gather and organize sensory information and to build transient and sometimes enduring internal representations of animals’ surroundings. Using relatively simple animals and focusing primarily on olfaction, we combine electrophysiological, anatomical, behavioral, and other techniques to examine the ways intact neural circuits, driven by sensory stimuli, process information. In the past year, our research program addressed several questions, such as what mechanisms—including the transient oscillatory synchronization and slow temporal firing patterns of ensembles of neurons—underlie information coding and decoding; how natural features of sensory stimuli are extracted; and how innate sensory preferences are determined. Our work reveals basic mechanisms by which sensory information is transformed, stabilized, and compared as it makes its way through the nervous system.

Resources

• Employee Listing
• E-Mail the Lab: stopferm@mail.nih.gov
• USCNE Home Page