MNBU | SCBST | UCSP | UDSP | UNP | USCNE | Main Page
 
OLFACTORY CODING BY ENSEMBLES OF NEURONS
     
Mark Stopfer, Ph.D., Head, Unit on Sensory Coding and Neural Ensembles*
Mark Stopfer
 
All animals need to know what is going on in the world around them; thus, brain mechanisms have evolved to gather and organize sensory information, thereby building transient and sometimes enduring internal representations of the animal’s surroundings. Using relatively simple animal models and focusing primarily on olfaction, we combine electrophysiological, behavioral, and other techniques to examine how neural systems process information. Our research program addresses several general areas of inquiry: the mechanisms that underlie information coding and decoding, including the transient oscillatory synchronization of ensembles of neurons; the mechanisms that underlie the phenomenon of stimulus invariance, in which stimuli are perceived as the same, or of the same class, despite actual differences in orientation, intensity, and so forth; the manner in which sensory stimuli make their way into short- and long-term memories; and the manner in which multi-modal stimuli are integrated into unified perceptions.


.
 

PUBLICATIONS

  1. Bazhenov M, Stopfer M, Rabinovich M, Abarbanel HD, Sejnowski TJ, Laurent G. Model of cellular and network mechanisms for odor-evoked temporal patterning in the locust antennal lobe. Neuron. 2001;30:569-581.
  2. Bazhenov M, Stopfer M, Rabinovich M, Huerta R, Abarbanel HD, Sejnowski TJ, Laurent G. Model of transient oscillatory synchronization in the locust antennal lobe. Neuron. 2001;30:553-567.
  3. Friedrich R, Stopfer M. Recent dynamics in olfactory population coding. Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2001;11:468-474.
  4. Laurent G, Stopfer M, Friedrich RW, Rabinovich MI, Volkovskii A, Abarbanel HD. Odor encoding as an active, dynamical process: experiments, computation, and theory. Annu Rev Neurosci. 2001;24:263-297.


*Joined NICHD in June 2002