Alexander Huk

Last updated
Alexander C. Huk
Nationality American
Alma mater
AwardsVision Science Society Young Investigator Award (2011)
Scientific career
Fields Neuroscience (Visual Neuroscience, Computational Neuroscience, Systems Neuroscience)
Institutions The University of Texas at Austin
Doctoral advisor David Heeger

Alexander C. Huk is an American neuroscientist at The University of Texas at Austin. [1] He is the Raymond Dickson Centennial Professor #2 of Neuroscience and Psychology, and the Director of the Center for Perceptual Systems. [2] His laboratory studies how the brain integrates information over space and time and how these neural signals guide behavior in the natural world. [3]  He has made contributions towards understanding how the brain represents 3D visual motion and how those representations are used to make perceptual judgments [4]

Contents

Education

Huk received a BA from Swarthmore College in 1996, [5] and earned his PhD from Stanford University under the supervision of David Heeger. He completed his postdoctoral work at the University of Washington with Michael Shadlen.

Career

In his doctoral work, Huk used fMRI to map the human brain areas associated with visual motion processing. [6] [7] His postdoctoral work investigated the neural mechanisms underlying temporal integration during perceptual decisions. [8] In his own laboratory, Huk and collaborators have used a combination of psychophysics, fMRI, and electrophysiology to establish the neural basis of 3D motion processing. [3] His group has also investigated the neural basis of perceptual decision-making. [9] [10]   In 2011, he won the Young Investigator Award from the Vision Sciences Society. [11]

Related Research Articles

The consciousness and binding problem is the problem of how objects, background and abstract or emotional features are combined into a single experience.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Figure–ground (perception)</span>

Figure–ground organization is a type of perceptual grouping that is a vital necessity for recognizing objects through vision. In Gestalt psychology it is known as identifying a figure from the background. For example, black words on a printed paper are seen as the "figure", and the white sheet as the "background".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retinotopy</span> Mapping of visual input from the retina to neurons

Retinotopy is the mapping of visual input from the retina to neurons, particularly those neurons within the visual stream. For clarity, 'retinotopy' can be replaced with 'retinal mapping', and 'retinotopic' with 'retinally mapped'.

Head direction (HD) cells are neurons found in a number of brain regions that increase their firing rates above baseline levels only when the animal's head points in a specific direction. They have been reported in rats, monkeys, mice, chinchillas and bats, but are thought to be common to all mammals, perhaps all vertebrates and perhaps even some invertebrates, and to underlie the "sense of direction". When the animal's head is facing in the cell's "preferred firing direction" these neurons fire at a steady rate, but firing decreases back to baseline rates as the animal's head turns away from the preferred direction.

David J. Heeger is an American neuroscientist, psychologist, computer scientist, data scientist, and entrepreneur. He is a professor at New York University, Chief Scientific Officer of Statespace Labs, and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Epistemic AI.

The normalization model is an influential model of responses of neurons in primary visual cortex. David Heeger developed the model in the early 1990s, and later refined it together with Matteo Carandini and J. Anthony Movshon. The model involves a divisive stage. In the numerator is the output of the classical receptive field. In the denominator, a constant plus a measure of local stimulus contrast. Although the normalization model was initially developed to explain responses in the primary visual cortex, normalization is now thought to operate throughout the visual system, and in many other sensory modalities and brain regions, including the representation of odors in the olfactory bulb, the modulatory effects of visual attention, the encoding of value, and the integration of multisensory information. It has also been observed at subthreshold potentials in the hippocampus. Its presence in such a diversity of neural systems in multiple species, from invertebrates to mammals, suggests that normalization serves as a canonical neural computation.

In cognitive neuroscience, visual modularity is an organizational concept concerning how vision works. The way in which the primate visual system operates is currently under intense scientific scrutiny. One dominant thesis is that different properties of the visual world require different computational solutions which are implemented in anatomically/functionally distinct regions that operate independently – that is, in a modular fashion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Retrograde tracing</span>

Retrograde tracing is a research method used in neuroscience to trace neural connections from their point of termination to their source. Retrograde tracing techniques allow for detailed assessment of neuronal connections between a target population of neurons and their inputs throughout the nervous system. These techniques allow the "mapping" of connections between neurons in a particular structure and the target neurons in the brain. The opposite technique is anterograde tracing, which is used to trace neural connections from their source to their point of termination. Both the anterograde and retrograde tracing techniques are based on the visualization of axonal transport.

Richard Alan Andersen is an American neuroscientist. He is the James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. His research focuses on visual physiology with an emphasis on translational research to humans in the field of neuroprosthetics, brain-computer interfaces, and cortical repair.

Gain field encoding is a hypothesis about the internal storage and processing of limb motion in the brain. In the motor areas of the brain, there are neurons which collectively have the ability to store information regarding both limb positioning and velocity in relation to both the body (intrinsic) and the individual's external environment (extrinsic). The input from these neurons is taken multiplicatively, forming what is referred to as a gain field. The gain field works as a collection of internal models off of which the body can base its movements. The process of encoding and recalling these models is the basis of muscle memory.

Joseph Anthony Movshon is an American neuroscientist. He has made contributions to the understanding of the brain mechanisms that represent the form and motion of objects, and the way these mechanisms contribute to perceptual judgments and visually guided movement. He is a founding co-editor of the Annual Review of Vision Science.

This article is about structure from motion in psychophysics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Doug Crawford</span> Canadian neuroscientist

John Douglas (Doug) Crawford is a Canadian neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Vision: Science to Applications(VISTA) program. He is a professor at York University where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Visuomotor Neuroscience and the title of Distinguished Research Professor in Neuroscience.

Joni Wallis is a cognitive neurophysiologist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Irene Mary Carmel Tracey,, is Vice Chancellor elect of the University of Oxford and Warden of Merton College, Oxford, her alma mater. She is also Professor of Anaesthetic Neuroscience in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences and Pro-Vice Chancellor at the University of Oxford. She is a co-founder of the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain (FMRIB) now the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging. Her team’s research is focused on the neuroscience of pain, specifically pain perception and analgesia as well as how anaesthetics produce altered states of consciousness. Her team uses multidisciplinary approaches including neuroimaging.

The occipital face area (OFA) is a region of the human cerebral cortex which is specialised for face perception. The OFA is located on the lateral surface of the occipital lobe adjacent to the inferior occipital gyrus. The OFA comprises a network of brain regions including the fusiform face area (FFA) and posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS) which support facial processing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathryn Mary Murphy</span> Canadian neuroscientist

Kathryn Mary Murphy is a Canadian neuroscientist and professor who studies development and plasticity of the brain.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laura Busse</span> German neuroscientist

Laura Busse is a German neuroscientist and professor of Systemic Neuroscience within the Division of Neurobiology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Busse's lab studies context-dependent visual processing in mouse models by performing large scale in vivo electrophysiological recordings in the thalamic and cortical circuits of awake and behaving mice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frontoparietal network</span> Large-scale brain network involved in sustained attention and complex cognition

The frontoparietal network (FPN), generally also known as the central executive network (CEN) or, more specifically, the lateral frontoparietal network (L-FPN), is a large-scale brain network primarily composed of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex, around the intraparietal sulcus. It is involved in sustained attention, complex problem-solving and working memory.

Neural synchrony is the correlation of brain activity across two or more people over time. In social and affective neuroscience, neural synchrony specifically refers to the degree of similarity between the spatio-temporal neural fluctuations of multiple people. This phenomenon represents the convergence and coupling of different people's neurocognitive systems, and it is thought to be the neural substrate for many forms of interpersonal dynamics and shared experiences. Some research also refers to neural synchrony as inter-brain synchrony, brain-to-brain coupling, inter-subject correlation, between-brain connectivity, or neural coupling. In the current literature, neural synchrony is notably distinct from intra-brain synchrony—sometimes also called neural synchrony—which denotes the coupling of activity across regions of a single individual's brain.

References

  1. "Alexander C. Huk" . Retrieved 2020-11-08.
  2. "Profile for Alexander C Huk at UT Austin". liberalarts.utexas.edu. Retrieved 2020-11-09.
  3. 1 2 Cormack, Lawrence K.; Czuba, Thaddeus B.; Knöll, Jonas; Huk, Alexander C. (2017-09-15). "Binocular Mechanisms of 3D Motion Processing". Annual Review of Vision Science . 3 (1): 297–318. doi:10.1146/annurev-vision-102016-061259. ISSN   2374-4642. PMC   5956901 . PMID   28746813.
  4. "Alex Huk (Alexander C Huk, AC Huk)". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2020-11-09.
  5. "Alexander Huk '96". Swarthmore College Bulletin. October 2009. Retrieved 9 November 2020.
  6. Huk, Alexander C.; Dougherty, Robert F.; Heeger, David J. (2002-08-15). "Retinotopy and Functional Subdivision of Human Areas MT and MST". Journal of Neuroscience. 22 (16): 7195–7205. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.22-16-07195.2002. ISSN   0270-6474. PMC   6757870 . PMID   12177214.
  7. Huk, Alexander C.; Heeger, David J. (2002-01-01). "Pattern-motion responses in human visual cortex". Nature Neuroscience. 5 (1): 72–75. doi:10.1038/nn774. ISSN   1546-1726. PMID   11731801. S2CID   11258429.
  8. Huk, Alexander C.; Shadlen, Michael N. (2005-11-09). "Neural Activity in Macaque Parietal Cortex Reflects Temporal Integration of Visual Motion Signals during Perceptual Decision Making". Journal of Neuroscience. 25 (45): 10420–10436. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4684-04.2005. ISSN   0270-6474. PMC   6725829 . PMID   16280581.
  9. Katz, Leor N.; Yates, Jacob L.; Pillow, Jonathan W.; Huk, Alexander C. (2016-07-07). "Dissociated functional significance of decision-related activity in the primate dorsal stream". Nature. 535 (7611): 285–288. Bibcode:2016Natur.535..285K. doi:10.1038/nature18617. ISSN   1476-4687. PMC   4966283 . PMID   27376476.
  10. Latimer, Kenneth W.; Yates, Jacob L.; Meister, Miriam L. R.; Huk, Alexander C.; Pillow, Jonathan W. (2015-07-10). "Single-trial spike trains in parietal cortex reveal discrete steps during decision-making". Science. 349 (6244): 184–187. Bibcode:2015Sci...349..184L. doi:10.1126/science.aaa4056. ISSN   0036-8075. PMC   4799998 . PMID   26160947.
  11. "VSS 2011 Young Investigator – Alexander C. Huk" . Retrieved 2020-11-09.