This project is funded by Integrative Strategies for Understanding Neural and Cognitive Systems (NSF-NCS), a multidisciplinary program jointly supported by the Directorates for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Education and Human Resources (EHR), Engineering (ENG), and Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences (SBE). Even basic perception of the world is not as simple as light coming into the eyes or sound coming into the ears. Rather, perception involves combining the incoming sensory information with cognitive processes such as past experiences, knowledge about the world, and personal tendencies. In other words, two people observing the same events (i.e., receiving the same sensory information) can arrive at different interpretations of what is happening in the environment. How the brain combines sensory information with these cognitive processes, and where this occurs in the brain, is incompletely understood. The key innovation of this project is to use a brain-computer interface (BCI) to tease apart which aspects of the brain's activity are sensory versus cognitive and how the two are combined in the brain to produce perception of the world. BCIs are widely-known for their ability to help paralyzed patients and amputees by allowing them to move a computer cursor or robotic arm simply by thinking about moving. Few studies have used BCIs as an experimental tool to understand sensory areas of the brain, as this project seeks to do. This work is likely to lead to a deeper understanding of how we perceive the world, as well as insights into how BCI can be used to help treat psychiatric disorders and recover function after injury. Furthermore, the investigators are developing BCI-based lab exercises for undergraduate courses, training researchers to become well-versed in experimental and computational neuroscience, and involving undergraduates, including women and underrepresented minorities, in the research.
This project focuses on visual area V4, which is known to be a crossroads for sensory and cognitive processes during visual perception. To dissect what aspects of neural activity are sensory versus cognitive, the investigators train animal subjects to volitionally modulate their V4 activity. The BCI provides subjects with moment-by-moment auditory feedback of their V4 activity. This project assesses what aspects of V4 activity can be volitionally (i.e., cognitively) modulated, how volitional modulation of V4 activity affects visual perception, and how malleable is the interaction between V4 and another brain area (prefrontal cortex) during visual perception. The key advantage of using BCI for this study is that it allows the investigators to challenge the subjects to produce particular patterns of neural activity. The investigators can specify in the BCI which patterns of activity yield a reward. This technique allows them to assess what aspects of the neural activity can be volitionally controlled by the animal (i.e., cognitive), and what aspects are hard-wired to the outside world (i.e., sensory). The applications of this BCI paradigm are extremely broad, and can be used to study other sensory, cognitive, and motor systems.
