Steven Chase

Abstract Calcium imaging has been widely adopted for its ability to record from large neuronal populations. To summarize the time course of neural activity, dimensionality-reduction methods, which have been applied extensively to population spiking activity, may be particularly useful. However, it is unclear whether the dimensionality-reduction methods applied to spiking activity are appropriate for calcium imaging.

Abstract Internal states such as arousal, attention and motivation modulate brain-wide neural activity, but how these processes interact with learning is not well understood. During learning, the brain modifies its neural activity to improve behavior. How do internal states affect this process?

Abstract Reliable perception of environmental signals is a critical first step to generating appropriate responses and actions in awake behaving animals. The extent to which stimulus features are stably represented at the level of individual neurons is not well understood. To address this issue, we investigated the persistence of stimulus response tuning over the course of 1–2 weeks in the primary visual cortex of awake, adult mice.