Sprague Lab
Principal Investigator: Thomas C Sprague
Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA)
Primary Subfield: Synthetic Bio
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY (See instructions): We live in diverse environments featuring dynamic, interacting stimuli that can be viewed from an arbitrary set of perspectives and approached under a variety of goal scenarios. However, modern cognitive and visual neuroscience studies often stand in stark contrast to this reality of our lived experience: typically, participants view isolated, simplistic stimuli while brain activation is recorded and reconstructed or decoded neural representations are quantified. Reconstructing naturalistic visual images from fMRI data presents a challenging task: existing approaches require dozens of hours of 7T fMRI data per participant and extensive compute capability, each of which render these methods inaccessible to traditional cognitive neuroscience labs. Our long-term goal is to develop data-efficient methods to enable use of natural stimuli in cognitive neuroscience studies which characterize neural information content and transformations with cognitive operations. Our objective in the present proposal, which is the next step towards our long-term goal, is to demonstrate the efficacy of natural image reconstruction as an experimental tool in cognitive ne…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EY035300-04: Probing the role of feature dimension maps in visual cognition (2026)
- 1R01EY038607-01: CRCNS: Data-efficient natural image reconstruction to advance visual neuroscience (2025)
- 5R01EY035300-03: Probing the role of feature dimension maps in visual cognition (2025)
- 5R01EY035300-02: Probing the role of feature dimension maps in visual cognition (2024)
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