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.

Public Health Relevance

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.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Eye Institute (NEI)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01EY026025-02
Application #
9233117
Study Section
Cognition and Perception Study Section (CP)
Program Officer
Flanders, Martha C
Project Start
2016-03-01
Project End
2019-02-28
Budget Start
2017-03-01
Budget End
2018-02-28
Support Year
2
Fiscal Year
2017
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Boston Children's Hospital
Department
Type
DUNS #
076593722
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02115
Tang, Hanlin; Schrimpf, Martin; Lotter, William et al. (2018) Recurrent computations for visual pattern completion. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 115:8835-8840
Zhang, Mengmi; Feng, Jiashi; Ma, Keng Teck et al. (2018) Finding any Waldo with zero-shot invariant and efficient visual search. Nat Commun 9:3730
Isik, Leyla; Singer, Jedediah; Madsen, Joseph R et al. (2018) What is changing when: Decoding visual information in movies from human intracranial recordings. Neuroimage 180:147-159
Kreiman, Gabriel (2017) A null model for cortical representations with grandmothers galore. Lang Cogn Neurosci 32:274-285
Tang, Hanlin; Yu, Hsiang-Yu; Chou, Chien-Chen et al. (2016) Cascade of neural processing orchestrates cognitive control in human frontal cortex. Elife 5:
Miconi, Thomas; Groomes, Laura; Kreiman, Gabriel (2016) There's Waldo! A Normalization Model of Visual Search Predicts Single-Trial Human Fixations in an Object Search Task. Cereb Cortex 26:3064-82
Gómez-Laberge, Camille; Smolyanskaya, Alexandra; Nassi, Jonathan J et al. (2016) Bottom-Up and Top-Down Input Augment the Variability of Cortical Neurons. Neuron 91:540-547
Tang, Hanlin; Singer, Jed; Ison, Matias J et al. (2016) Predicting episodic memory formation for movie events. Sci Rep 6:30175