PBIO SEMINAR SERIES

Sensory integration and adaptation: behavior, optimality and neural models.

Wednesday - November 28, 2007
07-08 SEMINAR SERIES

Philip Sabes
University of California San Francisco
Speaker's website

Host: Adrienne Fairhall

When planning and executing movement, the brain takes into account information from multiple ("redundant") sensory streams . For example, both vision and proprioception are used to localized the hand before a reaching movement. This ability relies on two experimentally observed processes. First, these sensory signals must be integrated, e.g. a "consensus" position estimate is computed. Second, when sensory signals conflict, sensory adaptation occurs to bring the signals back into alignment. I will show that these two processes are linked in a statistically optimal manner. I will present human behavioral experiments illustrating how the brain solves these problems and an "optimal estimator" algorithm that can account for the experimental results. I will then show that this algorithm can be implemented by a fairly simple a network model, which we propose as a model of sensorimotor areas in human parietal cortex.