Behavioral State Tunes Mouse (Color) Vision to Ethological Features through Pupil Dilation presented by Katrin Franke:

Sensory processing changes with behavioral context to increase computational flexibility. In the visual system, active behavioral states enhance sensory responses but typically leave the preferred stimuli of neurons unchanged. Here we find that behavioral state does modulate stimulus selectivity in mouse visual cortex in the context of colored natural scenes. Using population imaging, behavior, pharmacology, and deep neural networks, we identified a shift of color selectivity towards ultraviolet stimuli exclusively caused by pupil dilation, resulting in a dynamic switch from rod to cone photoreceptors. This facilitated the detection of ethological stimuli, such as aerial predators against the twilight sky. Our results suggest that the brain uses pupil dilation to differentially recruit rods and cones on short timescales to tune visual representations to behavioral demands.

Cone Spectral Topography and Vision at the Cellular Scale presented by William Tuten:

In principle, the arrangement and relative numerosity of the L, M, and S cone photoreceptors in the human retina places an important constraint on how spatial and chromatic information is encoded and processed by the visual system. In practice, however, linking the topography of the trichromatic cone mosaic to visual perception is not straightforward, in part due to uncertainties introduced by optical aberrations and eye movements. In this talk, I will review how adaptive optics platforms can be used to eliminate these sources of uncertainty, enabling psychophysical experiments that reveal how the detection and color appearance of small spots depends on local variations in the spectral topography of the receptor lattice.

What You Will Learn:

• How the brain uses pupil dilation to differentially recruit rods and cones on short timescales to tune visual representations to behavioral demands
• How the visual detection and color appearance of small spots depends on local variations in the spectral topography of the receptor lattice

Who Should Attend:

• Color and vision scientist
• Clinicians
• Optical engineers

About the Presenters:

Katrin Franke, Tübingen University

Katrin Franke received her Ph.D. at the International Max Planck Research School for Neural and Behavior Sciences at the Graduate Training Center, Tübingen. Since then, she has been Junior Research Group Leader at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Tübingen and then the Institute for Ophthalmic Research at Tübingen University. In addition, she is a Research Fellow in the lab of Prof. Andreas Tolias at Baylor College of Medicine Houston, TX, USA. Her work focused on how neural circuits across the early visual system of mice process the visual input towards driving behavior.
 

William Tuten, University of California, Berkeley

William Tuten is an assistant professor in the School of Optometry and Vision Science Graduate Program at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on developing and using advanced optical platforms to study vision at the cellar level in the living human eye. His current work includes studies aimed at understanding mechanisms subserving spatial and color vision near the fovea, as well as efforts to characterize the relationship between outer retinal structure and function in inherited retinal disease.