Neurobiology 204

A pdf of the syllabus is available here

Week 12 Rick Born

For a brief outline of this lecture, see here.

There are two, quite long, papers for background reading, which are key papers in the field relating neuron responses to perception:

Parker, A. J. and Newsome, W. T. Sense and the single neuron: probing the physiology of perception. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 1998; 21:227-77.
Britten, K. H.; Shadlen, M. N.; Newsome, W. T., and Movshon, J. A. The analysis of visual motion: a comparison of neuronal and psychophysical performance. J. Neurosci. 1992; 12(12):4745-65.

The paper for discussion is Purushothaman, G. and Bradley, D. C. Neural population code for fine perceptual decisions in area MT. Nat. Neurosci. 2005; 8(1):99-106.

Week 7 Monday Rick Born

For a brief outline of this lecture, see here.

The relevant papers for background reading are:

Barlow, H. B. (1986) Why have multiple cortical areas? Vision Res. 26:81-90.
Pack, C. C. and Born, R. T. (2001) Temporal dynamics of a neural solution to the aperture problem in macaque visual area MT. Nature 409:1040-1042.
Pack, C. C., Livingstone, M. S., Duffy, K. R. and Born, R. T. (2003) End-stopping and the aperture problem: Two-dimensional motion signals in macaque V1. Neuron, 39:671-680.

Week 5-6 Marge Livingstone

There is a mini-syllabus for these 2 weeks of the course available here.

For Wed March 8th you should read: Conway BR and Livingstone MS (2003) The neural basis for color vision (In Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Lynn Nadel, Editor). pp 568-576. London: Nature Publishing Group.
The Monday assignment and discussion will then focus on Fried, S.I., Munch, T.A., & Werblin, R.S. (2002) Mechanisms and circuitry underlying directional selectivity in the retina. Nature 420:411-414.
A related paper by the same authors is also recommended reading: Direction selectivity is formed at multiple levels by laterally offset inhibition in the rabbit retina, (2005) Neuron 46: 117-127

Other helpful background reading:
Barlow, H.B. & Levick, W.R. (1965) The mechanism of directionally selective units in rabbit's retina. J. Physiol. 178: 477-504
Euler, T, Detwiler, P.B. & Denk, W. (2002) Directionally selective calcium signals in dendrites of starburst amacrine cells. Nature 418:845-852
Background reading for the Mar 15th lecture on stereopsis is:
DeAngelis, G.C. (2000) Seeing in three dimensions: the neurophysiology of stereopsis. Trends in Cognitive Science 4:80-90.

Week 4 Clay Reid

There are two papers to read this week. For background reading, you should peruse Sillito et al. Nature (1994) 369: 479-483. Note that there are some additional colour figures appended to the pdf available here.
For your actual summary and critique, see Zhang Suga and Yan, Nature (1997) 387: 900-903.

Week 3 Clay Reid

Two textbook chapters provide a good background to the upcoming lectures:
This chapter from the textbook Fundamentals of Neuroscience
and this chapter on the thalamus from the book The Synaptic Organisation of the Brain.

Week 2 Richard Masland

Handouts are available for session one and session two.
In addition, a reprint of a paper is available:
Richard H Masland (2001) Nature Neuroscience 4(9): 877-886.

Week 1 Richard Born

The assignment handout is available here.
There are two articles to read:
The Cerebellum: A neuronal learning machine Raymond JL, Lisberger SG, Mauk MD. (1996) Science 272: 1127-1131
Expression of a Protein Kinase C Inhibitor in Purkinje Cells blocks cerebellar LTD and adaptation of the vestibulo-ocular reflex Chris I. De Zeeuw, Christian Hansel, Feng Bian, Sebastiaan K.E. Koekkoek, Adriaan M. van Alphen, David J. Linden, and John Oberdick (1998) Neuron 20:495-508

Please direct comments and questions on the course to Nic Price:
nicholas_price -at- hms.harvard.edu