Laboratory

in sensory physiology

Higher cognitive functions depend on the interaction of several brain regions. A well-studied example for a distributed cognitive faculty is perceptual decision making. Local but interconnected circuits in the visual, parietal and prefrontal cortex provide the neural resources to compute perceptual decisions, as sensory information is integrated by primates for engagement with the environment. Cognitive task performance is limited presumably by allocating local computational resources through dynamic changes in functional connectivity. We take a combined theoretical and empirical approach to probe causally - from neurons to behaviour - how resource allocation in visual and parietal regions can be controlled by altering functional connectivity in the closest available model to human cognition, the macaque monkey. We explore how perturbations of network dynamics through external stimulation can alter decision-making performance. We predict that our interventions readjust the correlation structure of neural population encoding in visual and parietal areas and this improves local resource allocation and task performance. Funded by the DFG (SFB 1436).