June 18 - July 1, 1998
Application Deadline: March 15, 1998
Information about other CSHL summer courses.
Organizers:
David J. Heeger, Stanford University
Michael N. Shadlen, University of Washington
Eero P. Simoncelli, New York University
Description: Computational approaches to neuroscience have produced important advances in our understanding of neural processing. The theme of this course is that an understanding of mathematical and computational tools in conjunction with perceptual and biological data can help guide research in neuroscience. Through a combination of lectures and hands-on computer laboratory experience, this course will cover neural image representations, the neural basis of color vision, pattern vision, visual motion perception, oculomotor function, and visual attention. This year, there will be a new emphasis on theories and computational models of the neural basis of visually-guided behavior and decision-making, a burgeoning area of sensory and computational neuroscience. Students should have experience in neurobiological or computational approaches to visual processing. Some computer programming experience is required.
Course Organization and Format: The course will be two weeks long, and each day of the course will include both lecture/discussion periods and time on the computers. In past years, participants' course activities have run from 9 am through midnight. A typical day of the course involves two lectures and two formal computer laboratories, combined with periods of free discussion.
Computer Labs and Course Projects: The computer labs will consist mainly of a series of computer tutorials. Some of these will cover the background material (linear systems theory, signal/image processing) that form the theoretical basis for much of the work on computational vision. But most of the tutorials will correspond to each of the lecture topics (see below). This year, MATLAB, will be used for most of the computer labs. As in past years, the participants will also be encouraged to do a course project, implementing a computational model of some aspect of vision.
This year's lecturers will be: E. H. Adelson (MIT), D. Brainard (UCSB), E. J. Chichilnisky (Salk Institute), D. Dacey (Univ. Washington), P. Glimcher (NYU), N. Graham (Columbia), J. Groh (Dartmouth), J. Maunsell (Baylor), J. A. Movshon (NYU), J. Palmer (Univ. of Washington), J. Schall (Vanderbilt), L. Welch (Brown).
Schedule:
| Day/Time | Topic | Lecturer |
|---|---|---|
| June 18 am | Elements of early vision | Adelson |
| June 18 pm | Color, trichromacy, and color spaces | Brainard |
| June 18 evening | Linear systems, convolution, and Fourier transform | Heeger/Simoncelli |
| June 19 am | Retina: anatomy and physiology of various types of bipolar, horizontal, amacrine, and ganglion cells | Dacey |
| June 19 pm | Color appearance and color constancy | Brainard/Chichilnisky |
| June 20 am | Retinal ganglion cell physiology | Chichilnisky |
| June 20 pm | LGN-V1 Physiology | Movshon |
| June 20 evening | Signal detection theory | Heeger |
| June 21 am | Models of V1 physiology, orientation, direction, and disparity selectivity, contrast normalization/gain control | Heeger |
| June 21 pm | Pattern detection and texture discrimination | Graham |
| June 21 evening | Multiscale/pyramid/wavelet image transforms as models of neural image representations | Heeger/Simoncelli |
| June 22 am | Statistics of natural images | Simoncelli |
| June 22 pm | Extrastriate and MT physiology | Movshon |
| June 23 | Day off | |
| June 24 am | Visual motion perception and psychophysics | Welch |
| June 24 pm | Model of MT physiology | Simoncelli |
| June 24 evening | Neural codes, noise, and the statistics of cortical spike trains | Heeger/Shadlen |
| June 25 am | MT and the neural basis of visual motion discrimination | Shadlen |
| June 25 pm | Frontal eye fields and the neural basis of saccade target selection | Schall |
| June 26 am | Decisions, LIP, and Frontal cortex | Shadlen |
| June 26 pm | Afternoon off to work on course projects | |
| June 27 am | Models of VOR and OKN eye movements | Glimcher |
| June 27 pm | MT and pursuit eye movements | Groh |
| June 27 evening | Models of saccadic eye movements | Glimcher |
| June 28 am | Linking brain and behavior with fMRI | Heeger |
| June 28 pm | Attention psychophysics | Palmer |
| June 29 am | Attention physiology | Maunsell |
| June 29 pm | Afternoon off to work on course projects | |
| June 30 | Course project presentations |