Research Interests

Work in our lab focuses on understanding how neurons within the visual system are organized to allow animals to perform visual tasks such as following moving objects in their environments. We use a combination of physiological, anatomical and modeling techniques to approach this goal.

We are using the visual system of freshwater turtles because the brain and eyes of these animals can be removed and kept alive in an in vitro preparation for several days. This permits us to use modern neurophysiological techniques to study the properties of individual cells in the visual cortex while presenting the retina with natural visual stimuli. We can characterize the biophysical properties of individual neurons and determine the roles that particular kinds of voltage-gated receptors or channels play in determining their integrative properties. Individual cells can be filled with marker substances that permit analyses of how they are related to cortical microcircuits and provide a characterization of the geometry of the cell.

Our ultimate goal is to use these kinds of data and modern mathematical modeling techniques to understand how neural networks involved in analyzing moving objects are organized at the levels of groups of interacting neurons.

Selected Publications

Ulinski, P. S. (1997) The nervous system of vertebrates: A comparative prospective. Handbook of Physiology: Comparative Physiology. Oxford University Press, pp. 17 - 54.

Ulinski, P. S. Neural Mechanisms underlying the analysis of moving visual stimuli. Cerebral Cortex: Models of Cortical Circuits. P. S. Ulinski and E. G. Jones, eds., Plenum Press.

Millonas, M. M. and P. S. Ulinski (1997) The dendritic origins of fast prepotentials in pyramidal cells. Proceedings of Computational Neuroscience, Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 141 - 145.

Colombe, J. B. and P. S. Ulinski (1997) Anatomical organization of feedforward pathways in cortical microcircuits. Proceedings of Computational Neuroscience, Academic Press, San Diego, in press pp. 605 -608.

Ulinski, P. S. and E. G. Jones, (1998), Plenum Press, Cerebral Cortex: Models of Cortical Circuits, Vol. 13, in press.

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