Our lab participated in a highly interesting workshop near Bremen this September! The workshop, titled “Cortex structure and function in mouse, monkey, and man” took place at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg Institute for Advanced Study, and it was organized by Udo Ernst and Fred Wolf.
The workshop focused on computational and neurobiological investigations of cortical and subcortical circuits across multiple species in the range from rodents to humans. Several sensory modalities were also included.
Our lab’s contribution focused on the functional specializations that emerge in visual representations in primates when it comes to vision for perception (primary visual cortex) and vision for action (superior colliculus). We put forward the argument that in primates, vis-a-vis mice, vision was not simply offloaded in primates to the cortex from the superior colliculus where it was primarily processed in mice. Rather, the primate superior colliculus still offers a visual scene representation, but it is simply optimized for serving orienting, which strategically exploits the proximity of the superior colliculus to the motor control periphery.
