Computational Neurophysics

Computational Neuroscience Lab

For making sense of, and for successfully interacting with our environment, our brain has to process distributed sensory information and to integrate it into meaningful percepts. This process is highly flexible and depends on various factors such as the current behavioural task, contextual information in the subjects’ environment, and internal states of the brain. Its flexibility allows our brain to rapidly configure different cognitive functions as required by the actual situation, and to reallocate limited neuronal resources to the most important computational processes.

Using different computational approaches comprising modelling, simulations, mathematical analysis, and data analysis combined with psychophysical and electrophysiological experiments (partly in collaboration with other groups), our lab investigates neural mechanisms, theoretical concepts and the collective dynamics of flexible information processing with focus on the visual system of primates. Current research foci are:

1. Neural Dynamics, Network States and Criticality 
2. Selective Information Processing in the Visual System
3. Feature Integration in the Visual System

Our lab actively pursues the transfer of knowledge from basic research into medical applications, with the ultimate goal to construct an intracortical visual prosthesis in cooperation with engineers, physiologists, computer scientists and medical doctors (collaborations with Creative Unit 'I-See' and troika project 'Interareal phase coherence as a mechanism for attention-dependent neuronal signal routing' in SPP 1665).

The group started in 2010 and was initially funded by Bernstein Award in Computational Neuroscience provided by the BMBF for research on the topic 'Rapid Parallel Configuration of Visual Information Processing'. Our lab is part of the Theoretical Physics Department.