Kay Lab
Principal Investigator: Kendrick Norris Kay
Institution: University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: Inquire for rotation/fellowship opportunities
Research Focus
PROJECT SUMMARY Much progress has been achieved in building computational models that describe how visual stimuli are encoded and transformed across the hierarchy of visual areas in the primate brain. However, relatively little attention has been given to the active component of visual processing, whereby the observer’s engagement in a cognitive or perceptual task can exert substantial influence on stimulus-evoked activity. The long-term goal of the proposed research is to develop models that account for not only stimulus-driven but also task-driven effects in the visual system. To achieve this goal, we invest effort in improving analysis methodology and in generating large high- quality experimental datasets. In Aim 1, we develop and optimize methods that provide robust fMRI measurements at the level of single trials. This includes a method that exploits temporal dynamics to isolate BOLD signals that are more closely related to local neural activity, and an algorithm that improves signal-to- noise ratio in general linear modeling of fMRI data. In Aim 2, we acquire and prepare a high-field (7T) fMRI dataset in which a large variety of tasks are performed on a common set of visual s…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01EY034118-04: Deep sampling of cognitive effects in the human visual system (2026)
- 5R01EY034118-03: Deep sampling of cognitive effects in the human visual system (2025)
- 5R01EY034118-02: Deep sampling of cognitive effects in the human visual system (2024)
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