Dr Jasper Poort

I am a Principal Investigator in the the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience in Cambridge. The aim of our Selective Vision Lab is to understand how our brain is able to selectively process that sensory information that is most relevant for decision-making. This capacity is crucial given the constant bombardment of data on our senses and the limited capacity of the brain. Altered selection of information is associated with cognitive deficits observed in neurodevelopmental disorders such as schizophrenia and autism. We use electrophysiology and 2-photon calcium imaging in identified cell-types (using post-hoc immunolabelling) combined with optogenetic cell-type specific targeting to both measure and manipulate activity of neurons, to study how perceptual organization, learning and attention alter the way in which visual stimuli are processed in different brain areas, including primary visual cortex (providing detailed representations of visual features) and higher-level frontal and parietal brain areas (with less detailed but more flexible task-dependent representations). We study neural circuits in both healthy mice and genetic mouse models of schizophrenia, including mouse models of 22q11.2 deletion syndrome (the biggest known genetic risk factor for schizophrenia), to unravel the conditions that determine both successful and unsuccessful sensory selection. See our lab website for more information and recent publications: https://www.pdn.cam.ac.uk/svl