Over the past decade neuroscience studies with awake behaving animals have shown that neuronal activity can change dramatically with behavioral context. Recent anthropomorphic models at the University of Rochester and elsewhere suggest that many representational problems that are complex when formulated in the absence of environmental and behavioral context become simpler in systems that directly exploit this context. These studies have shown that some complex behaviors can be reduced to a collection of loosely coordinated primitive behaviors, vastly reducing the need for complex internal representations. These and many other observations suggest that the natural variables for representing information in the nervous system may be in terms of the animal's behaviors. If this is the case, significant progress in neuroscience will require experimental apparatus that can directly measure important aspects of behavioral state. This proposal is to develop state-of-the-art instrumentation for the monitoring and simulation of behavior in conjunction with relevant neural parameters. This instrumentation would form a national resource that would be situated in a complex of three interrelated laboratories at the University of Rochester. The proposed experimental program is an integrated interdisciplinary effort that includes behavioral, computational and neuroscience experiments.
The specific aims of the resource would be as follows. A) The resource would greatly extend our capability to monitor behavior in natural situations. The design of the laboratory is directed primarily towards the system integration of four different kinds of recent technical innovations into a coherent setting: (1) equipment to measure eye movements in freely moving head situations, (2) devices for measuring kinematic state such as arm and hand movements, (3) devices for producing whole body accelerations, and (4) anthropomorphic devices to simulate experiments and develop experimental protocols. B) The resource would provide a setting for the conduction of interdisciplinary experiments that are tightly coupled in that the results of an experiment in one domain can be used to design experiments in other domains. C) The resource would provide a vehicle for the development and dissemination of new hardware and software specifically designed for the control of these environments.
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