Gregory Deangelis
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
When you move your eyes or walk through a room, the image on your retina shifts, even if nothing in the world has moved. The brain has to work out which motion comes from your own movement and which comes from objects moving around you.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
visual motion perception
depth perception
optic flow
- Grants
- 4 known grants, through Feb 2030
What they work on
- Test a theory predicting that people's perception of object motion and depth during pursuit eye movements is biased by viewing geometry, using human psychophysics while keeping the object's motion on the retina fixed.
- Determine whether neurons in the monkey visual motion areas MT, MSTl and VPS change their activity with viewing geometry in ways that can explain perceptual biases, by recording during passive viewing and during behavioral tasks.
- Build Bayesian and real-time control-theory models of causal inference, the brain's judgment of what caused a sensory signal, and fit them to behavior to predict neural responses.
- Use chemical and optogenetic inactivation in monkeys to identify the pathways from parietal or prefrontal cortex that feed causal-inference signals back to sensory areas during flow parsing.
- Map brain-wide neural correlates of moment-to-moment causal inference during continuous navigation, using high-density recordings in mice and recordings in monkeys.
- Train monkeys to steer through a virtual environment toward a remembered target, and fit optimal stochastic control theory to their behavior to estimate the hidden variables that govern steering.
- Record neuron populations in areas MSTd and 7a during steering to test how optic flow, motor-command copies and working-memory signals are represented and combined.
More about the research
It also has to judge how far away things are. These grants ask how the brain makes those judgments and how it uses them to guide action. The work combines human perception experiments, recordings of neurons in monkeys (and, in one project, mice), and mathematical theory.
Why it matters
Trouble perceiving self-motion is among the earliest effects of Alzheimer's disease, and it can affect daily life, including driving. Understanding how the brain processes optic flow could reveal how Alzheimer's disrupts vision-guided behavior and how those deficits might be eased. Problems with causal inference have also been proposed in schizophrenia and autism, so uncovering its mechanisms could eventually inform treatment of these disorders.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Jean-Paul Noel
University of Minnesota, MN·Neuroscience·Early-career
Develop a rodent virtual-reality task in which animals use optic flow to path integrate to a hidden target, then must separate self-motion from target-motion.
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.
Najib Majaj
New York University, NY·Neuroscience
Compare neural computations and behavioral algorithms in macaques foraging head-free in a foraging room with those during head-fixed navigation in virtual reality, to test whether restrained lab conditions differ from naturalistic ones.
The school
University of Rochester: 38 labs on PI Pages, $492M a year on research, 308 research doctorates a year.
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