Lawrence Sincich
University of Alabama at Birmingham, AL·Neuroscience
Everything we see starts with cone photoreceptors, the light-sensing cells in the retina that respond to color and fine detail. Their signals travel to primary visual cortex (V1), the brain area that receives most retinal input and sends different kinds of visual information on to higher areas.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Physiology
- Topics
primary visual cortex
secondary visual cortex
cone photoreceptors
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Apr 2029
What they work on
- Determine how many cone photoreceptors, and which cone types, feed the receptive field of a single V1 neuron near the fovea, using adaptive optics to image and stimulate individual cones in living non-human primates.
- Measure the elementary response of a V1 neuron to light delivered to a single cone, and estimate how many V1 neurons receive input from that one cone.
- Test whether groups of V1 neurons that project to secondary visual cortex (V2) receive input from different cone compositions, using adaptive optics to separate stimulus wavelength from orientation at fine spatial scales.
- Assess how resilient V1 responses are to stimuli degraded to mimic cone loss in retinal degenerative disease, and look for a single-neuron signature of perceptual filling-in.
More about the research
No one yet knows how signals from individual cones build the responses of single V1 neurons. The eye's own optics blur images and mix up wavelength, orientation and fine spatial detail, especially near the fovea, the center of sharpest vision.
Why it matters
Patients with retinal degenerative diseases often see better than imaging of their damaged retinas would predict. By testing whether visual cortex neurons stay resilient when cone signals are lost, this work could explain that gap. The grant states it could also open a new path toward earlier detection of retinal disease. It will also establish the basic rules for how single-cone signals shape cortical responses.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Donald Miller
Indiana University, IN·Biomedical Engineering
Measure the spectral sensitivity, or color response, of individual photoreceptors in the living human eye using adaptive-optics optical coherence tomography (AO-OCT) with phase-sensitive detection.
Jianhua Cang
University of Virginia, VA·Neuroscience
Confirm that Cbln4-positive neurons in the mouse superficial superior colliculus are inhibitory and direction selective, map their shape and connections, and manipulate them to test whether they adjust motion responses based on surrounding context.
Adam Kohn
Albert Einstein College of Medicine, NY·Neuroscience
Test whether feedforward–feedback loops between visual areas carry out predictive coding, by analyzing population responses recorded at the same time in macaque V1/V2 and V1/V4 to targeted visual stimuli.
The school
University of Alabama at Birmingham: 45 labs on PI Pages, $866M a year on research, 166 research doctorates a year.
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