Churchland lab

The lab’s first paper came out yesterday in the Journal of Neuroscience and was described rather amusingly in Science News Daily . In the paper, we test whether decisions about dynamic, time-varying stimuli benefit from multisensory inputs. In short, we find that such decisions do benefit from multisensory input, in the same way that decisions about static stimuli have been shown to do. And there’s a catch: the auditory and visual stimuli that we use don’t need to be played synchronously. Even two streams of asynchronous clicks and flashes are more informative than either stream alone. To us, this argues strongly that the auditory and visual streams are integrated separately, and then a final decision is made about the combined estimates.

We make observations from rodents to gain insight into our own neural circuitry (Courtesy of Manuel. Raposo).