This instrumentation will support research in the following areas: 1) Networks in the Retina and Lateral Geniculate Nucleus, and 2) Information Processing in the Visual Cortex. Experimental results on neural mapping will be sought from single and multi- unit recording with microeletrodes placed in the optic pathway and cerebral cortex of anesthetized monkeys. The research plan includes exploitation of new mathematical and computational methodologies for mapping receptive fields. These use theories of nonlinear systems analysis and require the capability of generating complex, pseudorandom patterns and then analyzing neural responses with mathematical transforms that require substantial computing power. Other projects in the research plan required image stabilization for precise mapping from the retinal image to the neural image on the cerebral cortex. This proposal requests a workstation with graphics display hardware and software for creating complex visual images, and a Fourward Technologies eye-tracker and image stabilization instrument for precise control of image location and of stimulus dynamics.
