Our lab participated in this year’s Primate Neurobiology Meeting. This meeting took place here in Tuebingen, and it hosted around 100 primate neurobiologists, primarily from Germany.
We presented 7 posters and 1 talk at this conference. Our presentations covered a variety of methods/results including behavior, neurophysiology, and computational neuroscience. We specifically had some newer explorations of smooth pursuit eye movements, in addition to our work on microsaccades and saccades.
Some of us also participated in a one-day workshop before the main meeting, primarily focused on methodological innovations in primate research. At this workshop, we presented our recent attempts at exploring machine learning methods in detecting saccades in eye traces, and also at developing minimally invasive eye tracking techniques for animal experiments. We believe that both of these approaches can streamline our and others’ work on primate neurobiology.
This year, the conference featured highly interesting keynote addresses by Doug Crawford, Greg Horwitz, and Wu Li.
We also held a two-day course after the conference as part of our national Graduate Training Program in Primate Neuroscience. The course was coordinated by our Gottingen colleague, Hans Scherberger, and it covered topics ranging from research to ethics and finally to methods associated with primate neurobiology. Several faculty members from all over Germany, including Ziad, gave lectures.