Hamutal Slovin

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Verified

Hamutal verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Bar Ilan University

The visibility of a briefly presented stimulus is diminished when followed by a mask, a phenomenon known as backward masking (BM). As the interval between the stimulus and the mask (stimulus-to-mask onset asynchrony, SOA) becomes shorter, the stimulus visibility decreases. Yet, the neural mechanisms underlying BM remains poorly understood. To inves...

Our eyes are never still. Even when we attempt to fixate, the visual gaze is never motionless, as we continuously perform miniature oculomotor movements termed as fixational eye movements. The fastest eye movements during the fixation epochs are termed microsaccades (MSs) that are leading to continual motion of the visual input, affecting mainly ne...

Luminance and spatial contrast provide information on the surfaces and edges of objects. We investigated neural responses to black and white surfaces in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mice and monkeys. Unlike primates that use their fovea to inspect objects with high acuity, mice lack a fovea and have low visual acuity. It thus remains unclear w...

Intracortical microstimulation (ICMS) in the primary visual cortex (V1) can generate the visual perception of a small point of light, termed phosphene, and evoke saccades directed to the receptive field of the stimulated neurons. Although ICMS is widely used, a direct measurement of the spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity evoked by ICMS and...

Our eyes are never still. Even when we attempt to fixate, the visual gaze is never motionless, as we continuously perform miniature oculomotor movements termed as fixational eye movements. The fastest eye movements during the fixation epochs are termed microsaccades (MSs), that are leading to continual motion of the visual input, affecting mainly n...

Optostimulation and electrical microstimulation are well-established techniques that enable to artificially stimulate the brain. While the activation patterns evoked by microstimulation in cortical network are well characterized, much less is known for optostimulation. Specifically, the activation maps of neuronal population at the membrane potenti...

Biologically plausible computational modeling of visual perception has the potential to link high-level visual experiences to their underlying neurons’ spiking dynamic. In this work, we propose a neuromorphic (brain-inspired) Spiking Neural Network (SNN)-driven model for the reconstruction of colorful images from retinal inputs. We compared our res...

Recently, mice became a popular research model for the visual system including objects processing. However, while primates use their fovea to inspect objects at high resolution, mice have low visual acuity and lack a foveal region. Thus, how objects are encoded in the visual cortex of mice and whether monkeys and mice use similar neural mechanisms...

Anesthetic drugs are widely used in medicine and research to mediate loss of consciousness (LOC). Isoflurane is a commonly used anesthetic drug; however, its effects on cortical sensory processing, in particular around LOC, are not well understood. Using voltage-sensitive dye imaging, we measured visually evoked neuronal population response from th...

Anesthetic drugs are widely used in medicine and research to mediate loss of consciousness (LOC). Despite the vast use of anesthesia, how LOC affects cortical sensory processing and the underlying neural circuitry, is not well understood. We measured neuronal population activity in the visual cortices of awake and isoflurane anesthetized mice and c...

Intra cortical microstimulation (ICMS) in the primary visual cortex (V1) can generate the visual perception of phosphenes and evoke saccades directed to the stimulated location in the retinotopic map. Although ICMS is widely used, little is known about the evoked spatio-temporal patterns of neural activity and their relation to neural responses evo...

Video stream: https://vimeo.com/362367119 During visual fixation, the eyes make small and fast movements known as microsaccades (MSs). The effects of MSs on neural activity in the visual cortex are not well understood. Utilizing voltage-sensitive dye imaging, we imaged the spatiotemporal patterns of neuronal responses induced by MSs in early visua...

Novel genetically encoded tools and advanced microscopy methods have revolutionized neural circuit analyses in insects and rodents over the last two decades. Whereas numerous technical hurdles originally barred these methodologies from success in nonhuman primates (NHPs), current research has started to overcome those barriers. In some cases, metho...

Intra-cortical microstimulation (ICMS) is a widely used technique to artificially stimulate cortical tissue. This method revealed functional maps and provided causal links between neuronal activity and cognitive, sensory or motor functions. The effects of ICMS on neural activity depend on stimulation parameters. Past studies investigated the effect...

During contour integration, neuronal populations in the primary visual cortex (V1) enhance their responses to the contour while suppressing their responses to the noisy background. However, the spatial extent and profile of these responses are not fully understood. To investigate this question, 2 monkeys were trained on a contour detection task whi...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia. One of the neuropathological hallmarks of AD is the accumulation of amyloid-β plaques. Overexpression of human amyloid precursor protein in transgenic mice induces hippocampal and neocortical amyloid-β accumulation and plaque deposition that increases with age. The impact of these effect...

The role of primary visual cortex (V1) in encoding physical stimulus features is well known, while stimulus categorization is mainly attributed to higher visual areas. However, visual experience is not stripped down to invariant, categorical-only "labels." Rather, visual experiences are remarkably rich with details resulting in high-resolution perc...

Unlabelled: The neuronal mechanism underlying the representation of color surfaces in primary visual cortex (V1) is not well understood. We tested on color surfaces the previously proposed hypothesis that visual perception of uniform surfaces is mediated by an isomorphic, filled-in representation in V1. We used voltage-sensitive-dye imaging in fix...

The visual system simultaneously segregates between several objects presented in a visual scene. The neural code for encoding different objects or figures is not well understood. To study this question, we trained two monkeys to discriminate whether two elongated bars are either separate, thus generating two different figures, or connected, thus ge...

The perceived color and brightness of a uniform surface can be influenced by its surrounding background. This perceptual phenomenon suggests an interaction between the edges of the surface and its interior. We asked what are the interactions between edges and center responses of chromatic surfaces in the primary visual cortex (V1) and how does it c...

We investigated the cortical mechanisms underlying the visual perception of luminance-defined surfaces and the preference for black over white stimuli in the macaque primary visual cortex, V1. We measured V1 population responses with voltage-sensitive dye imaging in fixating monkeys that were presented with white or black squares of equal contrast...

In a typical visual scene we continuously perceive a "figure" that is segregated from the surrounding "background" despite ongoing microsaccades and small saccades that are performed when attempting fixation (fixational saccades [FSs]). Previously reported neuronal correlates of figure-ground (FG) segregation in the primary visual cortex (V1) showe...

Microscopic in vivo measurements of cerebral oxygenation are of key importance for understanding normal cerebral energy metabolism and its dysregulation in a wide range of clinical conditions. Relevant cerebral pathologies include compromised blood perfusion following stroke and a decrease in efficiency of single-cell respiratory processes that occ...

Developing minimally invasive methodologies for imaging of internal organs is an emerging field in the biomedical examination research. This paper introduces a new multi-functional microendoscope device capable of imaging of internal organs with a minimal invasive intervention. In addition, the developed microendoscope can also be employed as a mon...

Imaging of high resolution targets

Supplementary Information

Magnetic micro particles imaged inside a phantom

The neuronal mechanisms underlying perceptual grouping of discrete, similarly oriented elements are not well understood. To investigate this, we measured neural population responses using voltage-sensitive dye imaging in V1 of monkeys trained on a contour-detection task. By mapping the contour and background elements onto V1, we could study their n...

Collinear patterns of local visual stimuli are used to study contextual effects in the visual system. Previous studies have shown that proximal collinear flankers, unlike orthogonal, can enhance the detection of a low contrast central element. However, the direct neural interactions between cortical populations processing the individual flanker ele...

VSDI spectrograms before and after subtracting the mean stimulus-evoked response from each trial and pixel. The VSDI spectrogram in the collinear condition averaged over pixels in the V1-CE ROI before (A; as in Figure 2C top) and after (B) subtracting the mean stimulus-evoked response from each trial and pixel (see Materials and Methods). Color den...

α-coherence dynamics after removing the stimulus-locked contribution. Similar to Figure 4 but here α-coherence was calculated after subtracting the mean stimulus-evoked response from each trial and pixel (see Materials and Methods). A: α-coherence as a function of time for the collinear (blue), orthogonal (red) and fixation alone (green) conditions...

α-coherence maps after removing the stimulus-locked contribution. Similar to Figure 3 but here α-coherence was calculated after subtracting the mean stimulus-evoked response from each trial and pixel (see Materials and Methods). A: Average α-coherence (AAC; averaged over 0–100 ms after stimulus onset) maps in the collinear (left) and orthogonal (ri...

The primary visual cortex (V1) is extensively studied with a large repertoire of stimuli, yet little is known about its encoding of natural images. Using voltage-sensitive dye imaging in behaving monkeys, we measured neural population response evoked in V1 by natural images presented during a face/scramble discrimination task. The population respon...

We present an approach for learning models that obtain accurate classification of data objects, collected in large-scale spatio-temporal domains. The model generation is structured in three phases: spatial dimension reduction, spatio-temporal features extraction, and feature selection. Novel techniques for the first two phases are presented, with t...

In this paper, we present a design proposal as well as a preliminary experimental validation of special multi-functional biomedical probe. The probe acts as a very thin endoscope (diameter of 100–200μm), while maintaining high imaging resolution. This micro-probe was made out of polymers, while the core is made out of polystyrene and the cladding i...

During visual fixation, the eyes make fast involuntary miniature movements known as microsaccades (MSs). When MSs are executed they displace the visual image over the retina and can generate neural modulation along the visual pathway. However, the effects of MSs on neural activity have substantial variability and are not fully understood. By utiliz...

Visual processing shows a highly distributed organization in which the presentation of a visual stimulus simultaneously activates neurons in multiple columns across several cortical areas. It has been suggested that precise spatiotemporal activity patterns within and across cortical areas play a key role in higher cognitive, motor, and visual funct...

Interpreting fMRI data relies on the assumption that hemodynamic responses reflect neuronal activity. Some recently reported results seem to suggest that this assumption might be less robust than what has been thought so far. Data by Schummers et al. (2008) suggest that hemodynamic responses depend on functional properties of astrocytes as mediator...

Accumulating psychophysical and physiological evidence suggest the involvement of early visual areas in the process of visual integration and specifically in local facilitation of proximal and collinear stimuli. However, the physiological evidence is primarily based on single cell recording and much less is known about the population level processi...

We present an approach for learning models that obtain accurate classification of large scale data objects, collected in spatiotemporal domains. The model generation is structured in three phases: pixel selection (spatial dimension reduction), spatiotemporal features extraction and feature selection. Novel techniques for the first two phases are pr...

Collinear proximal flankers can facilitate the detection of a low-contrast target or generate false-alarm target detection in the absence of a target. Although these effects are known to involve subthreshold neuronal interactions beyond the classical receptive field, the underlying neuronal mechanisms are not fully understood. Here, we used voltage...

The ultimate goal of high-resolution functional brain mapping is single-condition (stimulus versus no-stimulus maps) rather than differential imaging (comparing two "stimulus maps"), because the appropriate ("orthogonal") stimuli are rarely available. This requires some component(s) of activity-dependent hemodynamic signals to closely colocalize wi...

A novel method of chronic optical imaging based on new voltage-sensitive dyes (VSDs) was developed to facilitate the explorations of the spatial and temporal patterns underlying higher cognitive functions in the neocortex of behaving monkeys. Using this system, we were able to explore cortical dynamics, with high spatial and temporal resolution, ov...

Understanding of the spatio-temporal characteristics of the sensory-evoked cortical blood-volume and oxygenation changes is important from the physiological perspective as well as for the interpretation of results obtained by various neuroimaging techniques, such as optical imaging, PET and f-MRI, and for their improvement. The detailed picture, ho...

We present a transparent silicone dural substitute, which we have been using for the last 7 years for imaging cortical dynamics in awake behaving monkeys. This substitute enabled us to record optically for more than a year intrinsic or voltage sensitive dye signals. It is thin and elastic enough to allow microelectrode to pass through without any d...

The frontal eye field and neighboring area 8Ar of the primate cortex are involved in programming and execution of saccades. Electrical microstimulation in these regions elicits short-latency contralateral saccades. To determine how spatiotemporal dynamics of microstimulation-evoked activity are converted into saccade plans, we used a combination of...

Explorations of learning and memory, other long-term plastic changes, and additional cognitive functions in the behaving primate brain would greatly benefit from the ability to image the functional architecture within the same patch of cortex, at the columnar level, for a long period of time. We developed methods for long-term optical imaging based...

Functional magnetic resonance imaging can now resolve individual cortical columns, which should provide insights into sensory perception and higher cognitive functions.

There is considerable overlap between the cognitive deficits observed in humans with frontal lobe damage and those described in patients with Parkinson's disease. Similar frontal impairments have been found in the 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3, 6-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP) primate model of Parkinsonism. Here we provide quantitative documentation of the co...

A number of new imaging techniques are available to scientists to visualize the functioning brain directly, revealing unprecedented details. These imaging techniques have provided a new level of understanding of the principles underlying cortical development, organization and function. In this chapter we will focus on optical imaging in the living...

The study was designed to reveal occurrences of precise firing sequences (PFSs) in cortical activity and to test their behavioral relevance. Two monkeys were trained to perform a delayed-response paradigm and to open puzzle boxes. Extracellular activity was recorded from neurons in premotor and prefrontal areas with an array of six microelectrodes....

There are two views as to the character of basal-ganglia processing – processing by segregated parallel circuits or by information sharing. To distinguish between these views, we studied the simultaneous activity of neurons in the output stage of the basal ganglia with cross-correlation techniques. The firing of neurons in the globus pallidus of no...

1. To test the mode of functional connectivity in the basal gan- glia circuitry, we studied the activity of simultaneously recorded neurons in the globus pallidus (GP) of a behaving rhesus monkey. The cross-correlograms of pairs of neurons in the GP were com- pared with those of neurons in the thalamus and frontal cortex and to the cross-correlogra...

1. To test the mode of functional connectivity in the basal ganglia circuitry, we studied the activity of simultaneously recorded neurons in the globus pallidus (GP) of a behaving rhesus monkey. The cross-correlograms of pairs of neurons in the GP were compared with those of neurons in the thalamus and frontal cortex and to the cross-correlograms o...

It is possible that brain cortical function is mediated by dynamic modulation of coherent firing in groups of neurons. Indeed, a correlation of firing between cortical neurons, seen following sensory stimuli or during motor behaviour, has been described. However, the time course of modifications of correlation in relation to behaviour was not evalu...

Objectives Our long term goal has been to contribute to the discovery of principles underlying the "neural code" in the brain. Background A precondition to deciphering the "neural code" is to determine the functional architecture of cortex. Clearly one must first understand what is the basic function(s) actually performed by a given neuronal group(...