Title

Corticocortical communication 

Bio

Adam Kohn received a B.A. in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. He performed his graduate studies with Barry Whitsel at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, receiving a Ph.D. in neurobiology in 2000. He received postdoctoral training in visual neuroscience at New York University with J. Anthony Movshon. In 2006, Dr. Kohn moved to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is currently a professor in the Departments of Neuroscience, Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences, and Computational & Systems Biology. Dr. Kohn’s research focuses on issues of population coding, plasticity and corticocortical communication in the visual cortex. His lab uses neurophysiological, computational and perceptual methods to address these issues.

Abstract

Most brain functions involve neuronal population activity that is distributed across multiple areas. The routing of signals through this distributed network is flexible, changing from moment-to-moment to meet task demands. To determine how flexible cortical communication could be instantiated, we recorded spiking activity of neuronal populations across several stages of the macaque cortical visual stream.  Using dimensionality reduction methods, we find that inter-areal interactions occur through a communication subspace: downstream fluctuations are related to a small subset of source population activity patterns. Subspaces for feedforward and feedback interactions appear distinct. We propose that the communication subspace may be a general, population-level mechanism by which activity can be selectively and flexibly routed across brain areas.