Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

Animals are capable of complex behaviors and cognitive functions. What fundamental neural computations underlie them, and how are these computations implemented by circuits in the brain? Our research attempts to answer these questions.

Our current focus is on the study of attention control. We wish to understand how the brain implements the selection of one stimulus alternative among many thereby allowing animals to pay attention to the most important information at any instant. This ability to attend 'appropriately' is critical for adaptive behavior, and abnormalilites in this ability are a prominent symptom of several psychiatric disorders such as ADHD, autism and schizophrenia. By identifying the principles of circuit organization and function that underlie stimulus selection for attention, we wish to discover specific treatment targets to combat attentional dysfunction. We expect that the principles that we identify will shed light also on how the brain implements selection in a range of other complex cognitive behaviors such as decision-making and perceptual discrimination. 

In parallel, we wish to uncover how different species neurally solve similar problems: do they do it in the same way or do their brain circuits implement solutions differently? Finally, we are also interested in using insights from neurobiology to design efficient, artificial intelligent systems.