Our perceptions, behaviors, decisions, feelings and thoughts depend on putting together different sources of information. The long-term goal of our project is to elucidate the computations and interactions among brain areas subserving integration of cognitive information across space and time. As a paradigmatic example of cognitive integration, we focus on the problem of visual pattern completion. We can make cognitive inferences and recognize heavily occluded objects from partial information. Cognitive integration must act over time (e.g. comparing current states with past ones), across space (e.g. evaluating signals across different parts of the visual field) and across brain areas (e.g. simultaneously considering bottom-up inputs in the context of prior knowledge). To further our understanding of the neural circuits orchestrating pattern completion, here we record intracranial field potentials from temporal and frontal cortex through electrodes implanted in epilepsy patients for clinical reasons while they perform visual recognition tasks. By virtue of the high resolution of our recordings, we aim to elucidate the circuits, brain areas and dynamic interactions across areas involved in spatiotemporal integration during pattern completion. The results from these investigations will provide initial steps to characterize and constrain the fundamental problem of how information is integrated by cortical circuits.
Our brains must continually make cognitive inferences based on putting together information from different sources to orchestrate perceptions, decisions and behavior. Information must be integrated across space, across time and across different brain areas. The mechanisms underlying such integrative processes are critical to cognition and are only poorly understood. This proposal takes advantage of a rare opportunity to directly interrogate human brain function invasively to elucidate the mechanisms involved in spatiotemporal integration. The proposal examines pattern completion during visual recognition as a paradigmatic example of cognitive integration. Insights derived from understanding cognitive integration hold the potential to shed light on multiple psychiatric conditions where such integrative processes are either missing or impaired.
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