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EvoMorph - Evolution & Morphogenèse dans les systèmes moléculaires EvoMorph - Evolution & Morphogenèse dans les systèmes moléculaires Mécanique des systèmes biologiques intégrés et artificiels Mécanique des systèmes biologiques intégrés et artificiels Imagerie calcique et comportement du poisson zèbre et Danionella Cerebrum Imagerie calcique et comportement du poisson zèbre et Danionella Cerebrum Dynamique stochastique des systèmes réactifs et vivants Dynamique stochastique des systèmes réactifs et vivants Biophysique des micro-organismes Biophysique des micro-organismes
CNRS Sorbonne Université
Portrait de Volker Bormuth

Volker Bormuth

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  Multisensory signal processing: From whole-brain activity to behavior

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Our brain needs to constantly fuse sensory information detected by our multiple senses in order to produce a seamless coherentre presentation of the world. Rather than being the exception, this binding process is ubiquitous to sensory-motor integration and isimplicated in most cognitive functions. Its impairment is a cause of various pathologies, such as schizophrenia or autism. Multisensoryprocessing operates on all brain levels from primary cortices over subcortical structures up to higher associative centers, while thesmallest operational units are single multisensory neurons.

In an interdisciplinary effort, we combine optical developments, genetics and neuro-computation to obtain new insights into the activityof brain-wide neural circuits that process multisensory information. To reduce the complexity, we study the small transparent brain ofzebrafish larvae as a model system. We focus on gaze stabilization as an inherently multisensory model task that is conservedamong all vertebrates. This reflex uses both vestibular and visual information to drive eye movements in order to compensate forself-motion and maintain clear vision. We have developed a novel experimental platform in which a restrained larva can be submittedto vestibular and visual stimuli, as a pilot in a flight simulator. We can optically record the activity of all 100,000 neurons of the animalbrain as it performs multisensory integration tasks.To extract basic principles of how behavior is coded in multisensory neuronal circuits we interpret the brain-wide activity and theobserved behavior with methods from statistical physics. No other system can today provide a similar brain-scale, yet cell-resolvedview on the neuronal network dynamics subserving such a complex integration process.

We use this system to address three fundamental and generic questions relevant to multi-sensory integration.

1 – Multi-sensory enhancement. How multi-modal congruent sensory cues are integrated at the circuit level to enhance the precisionof the evoked motor response?

2 – Decision-making: Resolving conflicting sensory cues. When the brain is submitted to conflicting stimuli, which neuronalmechanism controls the prioritization of one sensory cue over the other?

3 – Cross-modal adaptation. How constantly out-of-register stimuli induces network plasticity in order to recover a coherentrepresentation ?

Selected publication:

Whole-Brain Calcium Imaging during Physiological Vestibular Stimulation in Larval Zebrafish

Migault et al. Current Biology (2018) 
 

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Publications (32)