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Pamela Reinagel
Assistant Professor of Biology
Secondary Appointments: Computational Neurobiology
Email: preinagel@ucsd.edu
Lab Website: http://www.biology.ucsd.edu/labs/reinagel/ |
| Neural Coding of Visual Information |
We are interested in the neural basis of real-world sensory perception. Our approach is informed by some observations about the problems faced by perceptual systems:
- Perceptual discriminations are normally made within a complex and structured sensory environment
- The input to each sensory receptor is constantly changing in time as things in the environment move and change, and as the organism itself moves through the world
- Often this complex and changing information must be processed from a single unique experience
- Reliable perceptual judgments must be made rapidly to be useful for the control of behavior
Therefore we are interested in how dynamic sensory stimuli can be reliably encoded by the responses of sensory neurons, in real time and in a single trial. To address this question we combine theory and experiments to study how neurons encode visual scenes for transmission from the retina to the brain, in a relay called the LGN. Our experiments combine anatomy, physiology, and visual behavior to study visual function at the systems level, primarily in rodents. Theoretical questions of current interest include temporal coding, population coding, natural scenes, adaptation, active sensing (eye movements), and the computational function of thalamocortical feedback. |
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Denning, K. and Reinagel, P. (2005). Visual Control of Burst Priming in the Anesthetized Lateral Geniculate Nucleus. J. Neurosci. 25(14):3531-3538.
Reinagel, P. and Reid, R.C. (2002). Precise firing events are conserved across cells. J. Neurosci. 22:6837-6841.
Keat, J., Reinagel, P., Reid, R.C., and M. Meister. (2001). Modeling precise spike trains from visual neurons. Neuron 30:803-817.
Kara, P., Reinagel, P. and Reid, R.C. (2000). Low response variability in simultaneously recorded retinal, thalamic, and cortical neurons. Neuron 27: 635-646.
Reinagel, P. and Reid, R.C. (2000). Temporal coding of visual information in the thalamus. J. Neurosci. 20:5392-5400.
Reinagel, P. and Zador, A. (1999). Natural scene statistics at the center of gaze. Network: Computation in Neural Systems 10:341-350.
Reinagel, P., Godwin, D., Sherman, M., and Koch, C. (1999). Encoding of visual information by LGN bursts J. Neurophysiol. 81:2558-2569.
Warland, D.W., Reinagel, P. and Meister, M. (1997). Decoding visual information from a population of retinal ganglion cells. J. Neurophysiol. 78(5): 2336.
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