Distinctive computational features of a sensory cortex and their role in perception, by Brice Bathellier

Summary Distinctive computational features of a sensory cortex and their role in perception
The cortex is modern invention of the mammalian brain and a major focus of modern neuroscience. Yet, its role in important functions such as sensory perception has been challenged by numerous cortical inactivation experiments resulting in a lack of effect during stimulus detection or discrimination. This is particularly true in the auditory domain, in which causal requirement for auditory cortex in perception heavily varies across stimulus choices and conditions. This raises the questions of the computations that makes auditory cortex sound representations necessary or not for solving a particular auditory task. In this talk, I will describe the results of a systematic comparison between neuronal population representations of diverse sounds across several stages of the auditory system, measured with two-photon calcium imaging and electrophysiology. Our results indicate that auditory cortex decorrelates sounds representations and specifically generates population representations in which time-averaging has little effect on the discriminability of time-varying sounds. The implication of these properties for the role of cortex in sound discrimination tasks will be discussed based on a bioinspired reinforcement-learning model. In addition, I will present results about the emergence of prediction signals and about specific neuronal population signatures of wakefulness in the auditory cortex.

Short biography Brice Bathellier studied Physics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, and soon after decided to move to neuroscience starting to work on computational modeling of neural networks. During his PhD at the Brain and Mind Institute of EPFL (Lausanne), he began to combine theoretical models and in vivo electrophysiological recordings, focusing on information processing and network dynamics in the olfactory bulb. After a postdoc in the Rumpel lab at the Institute of Molecular Pathology, where he explored with two-photon calcium imaging the non-linear dynamics of auditory cortex, he established in 2013 his lab at the UNIC CNRS unit, which later joined the Paris Saclay Institute for Neuroscience. He moved in 2020 to the new Hearing Institute, a research center of the Pasteur Institute. His main topics of interests are the principles of auditory perception, multisensory processing and biological learning.  More infos

Health pass and mask are required to attend