Slovin lab
Hamutal Slovin - Neuronal Imaging Laboratory
Research
1. Understanding Visual Procesing and Visual Perception
Our aim is to better understand the neuronal mechanisms mediating visual processing of simple and natural images. We investigate the "binding problem", namely, how spatially segregated neural activity binds together or group together to generate the perception of a coherent object.
A central line of research in our lab. is to decipher neuronal mechanisms mediating higher brain functions such as figure-ground segeration, visual attention, perceptual learning and visual awareness.
2. The effects of fixational saccades on visual and perceptual processing
We are interested to study the effects of eye movements on cortical activity. We found that neural activity in V1 is highly unstable and "jitter" around with every microsaccade or saccade the animal was doing.
Below we show how the response to a Gabor stimulus is shifted over cortical space due to a small microsaccade (single trial; taken from Meirovithz et al. 2010).
3. Decoding and reconsrtuction of visual content from brain activity
Another important goal of our team is to decode and reconstruct visual stimuli from brain activity of the visual cortex. This is done using brain inspired modeling. The image below demonstrated the reconstruction of a visual stimulus (pixel-by-pixel) from VSD brain activity in V1 (Zurawel et al. 2016).
4. Artificial vision
To generate artificial vision we investigate both intra-cortical microstimulation and optostimulation of opsin channels on cortical activity.
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