Dr Bruno Averbeck Research Profile

Research Profile

Dr Bruno Averbeck

CV (PDF)

Neurophysiology of Cognitive Motor Control

This research group has two interrelated research goals. The first is to understand how populations of neurons in the brain represent information and carry out computations on those representations. The second is to understand how these populations are responsible for the selection and execution of sequences of actions. In the pursuit of these goals we focus on the role of prefrontal cortex as well as regions of the basal ganglia to which these areas are anatomically interconnected. From a technical point of view we utilize multi-electrode recordings in awake, behaving monkeys, which provide us with the most detailed data obtainable on the relationship between the activity of populations of neurons in the brain and behavior.

Selected References

Averbeck, B. B. and Lee, D., Effects of noise correlations on information encoding and decoding. J Neurophys, 95:3633-3644, 2006.

Averbeck, B.B ., Latham P.E. and Pouget A.P., Neural correlations, population coding and computation. Nat Rev Neurosci, 7:358-366, 2006.

Averbeck, B. B. , Sohn, J.-W. and Lee D., Activity in prefrontal cortex during dynamic selection of action sequences. Nat Neurosci, 9:276-282, 2006.

This figure shows the representation, in prefrontal cortex, of knowledge of which sequence is currently correct in a sequence selection paradigm. When a switch occurs, such that a new sequence must be selected, there is a gradual transition from the representation of the old sequence, and correspondingly actions consistent with the old sequence (left plot), to a representation of the new sequence, and correspondingly actions consistent with the new sequence (right plot). In each plot, the actions consistent with either the previous or current sequence are shown in blue, whereas the neural representation of the correct sequence is shown in green (left plot) or red (right plot).