Research/Photo Gallery

When participants are instructed to click an object on the computer screen, the continuous trajectory of the mouse (green circles) exhibits attraction effects from objects with similar names (i.e., the candle).  These continuous attraction effects share much in common with a dynamical system settling into one or another of its attractor basins (shown underneath). See Spivey, Grosjean, & Knoblich (2005, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). Contributed by: Michael J. Spivey

The pressures of evolution have maximized the brain's processing speed and metabolic efficiency. Therefore, to understand why neurons in early visual cortex respond to specific visual patterns, you simply have to learn an appropriate efficient code. Here, we used independent components analysis (ICA) on a series of whitened image patches taken from pictures of natural scenes - rocks, trees, fields... For each filter, the "neuron" will fire if the image is bright on the bright spots and dark on the dark spots (more precisely, it's a linear filter). Some of these resemble simple cells in early visual cortex, as they have a characteristic oriented bright/dark pattern (like 2-D gabor functions, to be more precise). The idea is that the more filters derived from an efficient coding of natural scenes resemble those of neurons in early visual cortex, the better we understand how the brain processes visual input. For a more thorough understanding please visit http://emva.net/educational/introduction.html Contributed by: Mark V. Albert

During the spring and summer, midshipman fish (Porichthys notatus) migrate from deep waters offshore to spawn in nests in the intertidal zone along the Pacific coast of North America. Females use the male advertisement call (ÏhumÓ) to find a maleÌs nest in the rocky intertidal zone. Shown here are newly hatched midshipman embryos (about 10 Ò14 days old, about 0.8-1.0 cm length), each attached to the surface of a small rock by an adhesive disk on the bottom surface of their yolk sac Contributed by: Andrew H. Bass

A convict cichlid male (left) and female (right) pair providing care for their offspring. These monogamous fish have a specific parental division of labor with males defending territories and protecting offspring from intruders while females provide direct offspring care. These fish will combine their efforts to raise their offspring to independence. We test the neural phenotype with regards to neuropeptides of single and paired individuals, as well as these neuropeptides effects on their parental care ability.

New cells (black), many of them neurons, continue to form throughout life in many parts of the brains of birds. Here they are dividing in a zone of the hippocampus next to the ventricle, in an adult chickadee. As they mature, these cells migrate away from the venticle and deep into the hippocampus. Grad student Bernard Tarr has found that changes in the birds' housing environment can affect the volume of the hippocampus. He is now determining whether this treatment also affects the survival or destination of such new cells. Contributed by: Timothy J. DeVoogd

Please report corrections, questions, comments, and problems to: Lori Miller (lmm8 AT cornell.edu)