Abstract:
Natural visual processing entails a complex interplay between sensory input, behavioral context, and on-going brain dynamics. Our lab seeks to understand how these processes give rise to goal-directed visual behaviors, by exploring the neural circuits mediating ethologically relevant behaviors that laboratory mice perform, including prey capture and distance estimation. We are also implementing novel experimental approaches to investigate neural coding of the visual scene as animals freely move through their environment. Finally, I will present a new research direction studying the completely different, yet largely unexplored, visual system of the octopus.