Steinmetz, Nick
<p>Apr 18, 2012 07:25 PM
discussion with Nick...  by his office in Clark (near Kwabena Boahen office)
Nick's research is in the animal tower.
 
1)  Christof Koch, Itto  model of visual attention.
Clay Reed and Christof  now head of a new Allen Brain Instit on Visual Cortex.
 
2)  relation btwn FEF and V4.  I say  covert attn is not that important.
He says... might be important in deciding what to saccade to next  (see CK model above).
Also he says  visual salience is thot to be encoded in LIP (lateral intrapar cortex): pretty girl or
lion out of the corner of your eye.
 
Apr 09, 2012 09:22 PM
 
Grad Student seminar today at 5:15PM... great talk.  see my notes:
 
he has done only one subject  (one macaque)  in Tirin Moore's lab.
 
takes 8 months to train monkey.
 
fixate on center of field  (eyes are tracked);
 
then an arrow shows where the target will appear  (monkey still maintains fixation):
 
then the four targets appear (at abt 7 degr of eccentricity from center);
if the cued target has a tilted grid (which it attends to but does not fixate)
 (the targets are B/W gabor gribs) then the monkey ANTISACCADES to the target at the opposite corner!
 
electrode is a linear array and is placed into V4 only....
goal is to determine how FEF modulates V4 in the presaccade (saccade planning) phase.
 
Nick spends  90% of his time in Tirin's lab and perhaps 10% on Neurogrid  sim  work  (trying to replicate
his data using Neurogrid).  that work is still early.
 
 
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