Shadlen Lab
Principal Investigator: Michael Neil Shadlen
Institution: Columbia University (New York, NY)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
Abstract You can point the door of the room with your eyes closed. Patients with certain brain lesions cannot, although they can point to it if they can see it. Establishing a spatially accurate memory of visual space requires solving a classic problem in cognitive neuroscience: to understand how the brain changes a retinal signal, arising from a constantly moving eye, into a spatially accurate signal for memory, perception, and action. Two pioneering neuroscientists suggested different solutions to this problem. Hermann von Helmholtz postulated that the brain achieves spatial accuracy by feeding the motor command for an eye movement back to the visual system, to compensate for an impending saccade, and thus maintain a spatially accurate representation of the visual world, a process now known as corollary discharge. Sir Charles Sherrington postulated that oculomotor proprioceptors could measure the position of the eyes in the orbit, and where the head is on the body, to use these data to calculate the spatial location of visual objects. There is physiological evidence for both viewpoints: when a monkey plans a saccade, neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) respond to stim…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EY036455-03: The Role of Oculomotor Proprioception in the Establishment of Long-Term Visuospatial Memory (2026)
- 5R01EY036455-02: The Role of Oculomotor Proprioception in the Establishment of Long-Term Visuospatial Memory (2025)
- 5R01MH122513-05: Uncovering the neural architecture underlying decisions abstracted from movements (2024)
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