We published a new Dispatch article in Current Biology. In this article, we described recent results in the rodent superior colliculus out of the laboratory of Dr. Karl Farrow, which investigated visual field representations in this brain structure. Comparing properties in rodent and primate superior colliculus is very important, because it is likely that principles[…]

Our lab participated in this year’s annual Bernstein Conference for Computational Neuroscience, which took place in Berlin, Germany. We presented exciting results from our ongoing collaboration with the lab of Thomas Münch, also located here in Tübingen with us. In this most interesting collaboration, we are exploring the impacts of rapid eye movements on visual[…]

Our lab presented two posters about our recent research findings at this year’s European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), which took place in Italy.

We had a visit from our former Ph.D. student, Chih-Yang Chen. Chen came from Kyoto for about a week, and we discussed follow-up science to the previous publications. Chen also presented some of his Kyoto work to us and our colleagues.

Our lab participated in this year’s departmental retreat in Obermarchtal. We presented three talks about our ongoing projects. It was a great experience to interact with other department members about our and their science. Most of us also went to Obermarchtal by bike, through the beautiful Lautertal region to the south of Tuebingen. It was[…]

We have a new paper in press at Frontiers in Neural Circuits! The paper is part of a Special Research Topic on “The Superior Colliculus/Tectum: Cell Types, Circuits, Computations, and Behaviors”. Our study complements this one and this one from our lab, and it continues our efforts to explore the visual processing properties of the primate[…]

We have a new exciting paper in press at Nature Communications. The paper continues our recent attempts at characterizing the visual functions of the primate superior colliculus (SC). Here, we characterized spatial frequency tuning characteristics of neurons in the SC. We found that, indeed, SC neurons exhibit their own preferences for individual spatial frequencies. Interestingly,[…]

We have developed a novel, state-of-the-art algorithm for detecting saccades and microsaccades in eye movement traces. The algorithm, based on deep neural networks, achieves human-level performance, and it is also able to detect post-saccadic oscillations as well as eye blinks. The algorithm outperforms existing algorithms on benchmark data sets, as well as on our in-house[…]

We spent a day bicycling in the beautiful hills around Tuebingen, and then hiking up the Rossberg peak, the highest peak in our region. It was a nice way to reminisce on our past science, and re-invigorate ourselves for future discoveries.

We participated in this year’s annual VSS meeting in Florida. We presented intriguing results exploring mechanisms of saccadic suppression. In this phenomenon, visual sensitivity to brief flashes is dramatically reduced if the flashes happen to occur in the temporal vicinity of a rapid eye movement that we make. However, rapid eye movements move images impinging[…]