We have a new paper now out in Communications Biology! This is a massive study combining electrophysiological recordings in mouse, pig, and macaque monkey retinas with 2-photon calcium imaging, computational modeling, and human psychophysics. The aim? To understand the retinal mechanisms underlying the well-known phenomenon of perceptual saccadic suppression. In previous studies, like this one[…]

Our lab just participated in the fantastic Berlin conference on “Subcortico-cortical loops in sensory processing and perception” last week, which took place in the Charité Berlin University Hospital campus. The conference was organized by Livia de Hoz and Julio Hechavarria as part of the newly established Special Priority Programme (SPP) 2411 on “Sensing LOOPS: cortico-subcortical[…]

We have a new paper that was just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The foveal visual image region is a tiny part of our visual field in which we have very high visual acuity. This is why we typically direct our gaze such that our foveal visual image region[…]

Our presentations from the “real” VSS in May were also made available online in the Virtual VSS sessions last week. The videos of these presentations are available below. In the first two videos, Matthias and Anna describe our intriguing discovery of sensory tuning in the superior colliculus motor commands, and the potential perceptual consequences of[…]

Our lab participated in the first in-person VSS conference since the start of the pandemic. It felt nice to visit the conference site once again, and to see so many familiar and new members of the Vision Sciences Society all join together to present and discuss science. From our lab, Matthias and Ziad presented two[…]

Our lab participated in the first Thematic Workshop of the In2Primates International Training Network (ITN). The workshop took place in Rome, and was hosted by Sapienza University Rome, one of the participant institutions of the ITN. In2Primates is a European wide network focusing on primate neurobiology, and spanning several institutes from France, Germany, Greece, Italy,[…]

Our 2020 study at Nature Communications is being featured today on Das Erste, Germany’s flagship TV channel. The study will be highlighted on the quiz show “Wer weiß denn sowas?” (“Who knows what?”). In our study, we discovered how the retina can already contribute to the well known phenomenon of perceptual saccadic suppression. This phenomenon[…]

Our lab participated in this year’s Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) conference, which took place in Lisbon, Portugal. We investigated intriguing new properties of saccade-related motor bursts in the superior colliculus (SC). A popular view of these bursts is that they dictate moment-to-moment eye movement execution properties. However, our results suggest that these “movement commands”[…]

We were very happy to host the tenth CIN-NIPS Systems Neuroscience Symposium this year, which took place last week. The event was online this time due to the pandemic situation, but it represents a continuous tradition of bilateral symposia between our institute and the National Institute for Physiological Sciences in Okazaki, Japan. The symposium featured[…]

Our lab is participating in this year’s ZüMüTü meeting! Last year, the meeting was canceled because of the pandemic. This year, it was decided to hold a slightly smaller meeting online, hosted by our colleagues in Zürich. We are very happy to revive such a tradition in the local region. Our lab is presenting several[…]