Adam Kohn
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY·Neuroscience
Seeing depends on brain areas that talk to each other in both directions. Lower visual areas send information up the hierarchy through feedforward connections.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Computer Science
Psychology
- Topics
visual cortex
feedback signaling
feedforward signaling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Feb 2027
What they work on
- Test whether feedforward–feedback loops between visual areas carry out predictive coding, by analyzing population responses recorded at the same time in macaque V1/V2 and V1/V4 to targeted visual stimuli.
- Develop a hierarchical spiking network model of predictive coding to relate theory to recorded data, and to show how the observed patterns of signaling between areas support or limit this computation.
- Test how predictions made by monkeys performing a perceptual decision-making task are passed between cortical areas and shape visual responses.
More about the research
Higher areas send signals back down through feedback connections. Feedforward signals are thought to build increasingly complex visual features. What feedback does is far less clear. Proposed roles include providing context, predictions, attention and learning signals. Testing these ideas requires tracking signals flowing in both directions at once.
Why it matters
Faulty communication between brain areas is thought to play a central role in psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. Understanding how cortical areas exchange feedforward and feedback signals could help researchers understand these disorders. It may eventually inform the development of treatments. The analysis tools developed could also be applied broadly in neuroscience.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Lawrence Sincich
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Determine how many cone photoreceptors, and which cone types, feed the receptive field of a single V1 neuron near the fovea, using adaptive optics to image and stimulate individual cones in living non-human primates.
Michael Stryker
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
Record large populations of neurons with multi-electrode arrays in the retina and visual cortex of awake, behaving mice while they view naturalistic visual flow and simpler artificial patterns.
Edmund Lalor
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Measure "perceptual echoes", reverberating responses in early visual cortex, with high-density EEG to isolate top-down predictive feedback in healthy volunteers and in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
The school
Albert Einstein College of Medicine: 21 labs on PI Pages, $361M a year on research, 36 research doctorates a year.
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