Dr. Janelle Pakan
Date & time: 12.06.2023 | 16:00 - 17:30
Room 2030, Cognium, Hochschulring 18
We are constantly learning from our experiences as we engage with the world around us. During this active learning, our senses work together to build an external reality that is also influenced by our current behavior. A major challenge in modern neuroscience is to elucidate how sensory and behavioral systems are integrated across distributed brain networks and influence each other. How does contextual sensory stimulation translate into behavioral output and how does our behavioral output subsequently affect basic sensory processing? A crucial step towards understanding the operating principles of these neural circuits is to directly observe the activity of local circuit elements with high temporal and spatial resolution during sensation and action. To this end, my lab uses in vivo two-photon calcium imaging in combination with virtual environments to investigate principles of cortical plasticity in sensory and associative brain regions at different levels of task engagement in mice.