The Brandeis Neuroscience graduate students and postdocs are pleased to announce the upcoming visit of their invited speaker for the Ruth Ann & Nathan Perlmutter Science Forum for this year, Dr. Bruce Carlson from Washington University at St.Louis. Prof. Carlson will be presenting the following talk:
Temporal Pattern Recognition through Short-Term Plasticity
Monday (April 26th) at 4 pm in Gzang 121
There will be a reception immediately be following the talk in the Shapiro Science Center Atrium.
Bruce Carlson’s lab uses electric fish as a model for sensory signal production, processing and representation. These fish generate series of electric pulses that they continually monitor in order to navigate and communicate social information such as sex and dominance. The pulse trains are both the input and output of the system and pulse train patterns can be used to ask how the parameters of the pulses (i.e. amplitude and phase) are encoded by the sensory system. Carlson previously found that in these fish, hindbrain neurons receiving input from electric organ sensory afferents categorically respond to different features of a temporally patterned electric pulse input. Furthermore, he has suggested that these neurons’ response differences can largely be explained by alterations in short-term plasticity.
References:
1. Temporal-pattern recognition by single neurons in a sensory pathway devoted to social communication behavior. Carlson BA (2009) Journal of Neuroscience 29: 9417-9428.
2. From stimulus estimation to combination sensitivity: encoding and processing of amplitude and timing information in parallel, convergent sensory pathways. Carlson BA and Kawasaki M (2008). Journal of Computational Neuroscience 25: 1-24.
