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SUMMARY:Blue Brain Seminar – White noise background improves tone discri
 mination by suppressing cortical tuning curves
DTSTART:20190624T150000
DTEND:20190624T160000
DTSTAMP:20260509T103440Z
UID:7e40e598c405cb9c3b24a47cd46d9886f4fa8179afe5166fe0c15f24
CATEGORIES:Conferences - Seminars
DESCRIPTION:Tania Rinaldi Barkat\nBlue Brain is delighted to announce that
  the fourth seminar in the series in Neural Computation\, will be on “Wh
 ite noise background improves tone discrimination by suppressing cortical 
 tuning curves”.\n\nThe seminar will be given by Tania Rinaldi Barkat who
  is an Assistant Professor in Neurophysiology\, in the Department of Biome
 dicine at Basel University.\n\nAbstract: The brain faces the difficult ta
 sk of maintaining a stable representation of key features of the outside w
 orld in noisy sensory surroundings. How does the sensory representation ch
 ange with noise\, and how does the brain make sense of it? We investigated
  the effect of background white noise (WN) on tuning properties of neurons
  in mouse A1 and its impact on discrimination performance in a go/nogo tas
 k. We found that WN suppresses activity of A1 neurons\, which surprisingly
  increases the discriminability of tones spectrally close to each other. T
 o confirm the involvement of A1\, we optogenetically excited parvalbumin p
 ositive (PV+) neurons in A1 which had similar effects as WN on both tuning
  properties and frequency discrimination. A population model suggests that
  suppression of A1 tuning curves increases frequency selectivity and there
 by improves discrimination. Our findings demonstrate that the cortical rep
 resentation of pure tones adapts during noise to improve sensory acuity.\n
 \nThe seminar is an open event\, at the Blue Brain offices in the Campus B
 iotech\, Geneva.  Upon arrival at the Campus Biotech\, please sign in at 
 the Campus Biotech reception.
LOCATION:6th Floor B1\, Campus Biotech\, Chemin des Mines 9\, Geneva https
 ://www.epfl.ch/research/domains/bluebrain/blue-brain/contact/
STATUS:CONFIRMED
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