Dr. Boynton joined the faculty of the University of Rochester in 1952 as an Assistant Professor of Psychology. In 1963, Dr. Boynton founded the University of Rochester's Center for Visual Science (CVS), and served as director of CVS until 1971. He was well known for his research on the neurophysiological processes in the eye and brain that underlie vision. His book, "Human Color Vision" is a standard text studied by others in this area of science. He also published more than 1,500 pages in his more-than-40-year career. The CVS Boynton Colloquium Series, which features leading researchers across the interdisciplinary field of vision research, is named in his honor.

Upcoming Boynton Colloquia

January 31, 2024
3:00 p.m., Rm 2-6408, K207 Auditorium

Jess Cardin, Department of Neuroscience, Yale School of Medicine

Cortical network events underlying perceptual behavior

Cognitive processes underlying behavior are linked to specific spatiotemporal patterns of neural activity in the neocortex. These patterns arise from synchronous synaptic activity and are often detected as prominent peaks in particular frequency bands in the cortical field potential. Activity in a wide range of frequencies (5-100Hz) generally occurs in correlation with cognitive behaviors such as navigation, attention, perception, and memory. However, cortical activity is highly variable on multiple timescales (milliseconds to hundreds of seconds), obscuring the fine temporal relationship between bouts of patterned activity and behavior. Identifying discrete neural events underlying patterned activity within highly dynamic cortical network fluctuations thus remains a critical challenge. We developed a novel analytical method to track individual network events underlying state-dependent activity with single-cycle precision. We find in mouse primary visual cortex (V1) that γ- (30-80Hz), but not β- (15-30Hz), range events are associated with feedforward thalamocortical drive and can be selectively evoked by thalamocortical stimulation in a biologically realistic pattern, but not by Poisson or regular stimulation. g, but not b, events are associated with enhanced visual encoding by V1 neurons despite their neighboring frequency bands. Gamma event rate increases steadily prior to visually-cued behavior, accurately predicting trial-by-trial visual detection performance. This relationship between cortical γ events and behavior is sensory modality-specific and rapidly modulated by changes in task objectives, but unaffected by behavioral state. Gamma events thus selectively support flexible cortical encoding according to behavioral context, suggesting a distinct role for transient patterns of cortical activity.