Naureen Ghani Event host: Angus Chadwick Talk Title: Mice wiggle a wheel to boost the salience of low visual contrast stimuliAbstract: From the Welsh tidy mouse to the New York City pizza rat, movement belies rodent intelligence. We show that head-fixed mice develop an active sensing strategy while performing a visual perceptual decision-making task (The International Brain Laboratory, 2021). Akin to humans shaking a computer mouse to find the cursor on a screen, we demonstrate that mice wiggle the wheel that controls the movement of a visual stimulus to boost low contrast salience. Moreover, mice wiggle the wheel at a temporal frequency (11.9 ± 2.9 Hz) optimal for their visual systems (Umino et al, 2018). With the "old method of watching and wondering about behavior," we reveal that mice exploit that it is easier to see something moving than something stationary by wiggling (Tinbergen, 1973).Bio: Naureen Ghani is a recent PhD graduate from the labs of Tom Mrsic-Flogel and Peter Latham at UCL (2024). She received her BS in Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University in the City of New York, mentored by Rafael Yuste and Larry Abbott (2015). In the first year of her PhD, she showed that ultrasonic noise emitted by motion sensors impacted mouse behavioral performance. In the final year of her PhD, she showed that mice develop an active sensing strategy in a visual perceptual decision-making task. She aims to pursue research at the intersection of neuroscience and statistics.Event type: SeminarThis seminar is sponsored by the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Biomedical AIDate: Tuesday, 15th OctoberTime: 11:00Location: G.03Speaker(s): Naureen Ghani - Naureen Ghani (ucl.ac.uk)Chair/Host: Angus Chadwick This article was published on 2024-11-22
