Sensing LOOPS: Cortico-subcortical Interactions for Adaptive Sensing (SPP 2411)
Deadline: 28. September 2022
Our brain perceives the world dynamically, zooming in on relevant stimuli and fading out irrelevant ones, generating biased moment-to-moment snapshots of reality. This “adaptive sensing” of the world is at the essence of the flexibility that has allowed mammals to flourish in varying environmental conditions. Adaptive sensing depends on the interaction between incoming sensory input and the feedback that can modulate it, in other words, it depends on a processing loop. Anatomists have known of feedback projections for decades. These projections often arise in the cortex and innervate numerous subcortical nuclei at various levels of sensory processing, creating cortico-subcortical loops. And yet, we continue to view sensory processing as a feedforward transformation of information. Feedforward networks, however, fail to capture the high proficiency of mammalian brains to flexibly and adaptively interpret a complex world, according to current needs and previous experience. The core aim of this Priority Programme is to provide a deeper understanding of the functional role of cortico-subcortical loops in adaptive sensing, across modalities and in behaving animals, and to revisit the role of subcortical structures classically regarded as “relay” stations.
We invite research proposals with an emphasis on the dynamics of cortico-subcortical loops during active behaviour that address, in a single sensory modality or multiple sensory modalities, one or more of the following fundamental research areas from an experimental and/or computational perspective.
- Theme A: The role of corticofugal feedback in context-dependent sensory processing. Here, context refers to sensory (background, noise) or behavioural (task, state) conditions.
- Theme B: The role of corticofugal feedback during prediction and attention. Research in this theme will revolve around sensory inference or sensorimotor predictions, and top-down selective attention.
- Theme C: The role of corticofugal feedback during learning. Research in this theme will probe the plasticity of corticofugal and subcortical structures during learning, and study processes related to stimulus-stimulus or stimulus-outcome associations.
