Neural basis of natural behavior.
Brains and behaviors evolved together in a complex, dynamic world. Our goal is to understand neural computation under the conditions in which those mechanisms evolved to operate.
Natural behavior is not simply a more complicated version of a laboratory task. Perception, action, memory and social interaction continuously shape one another. What an animal sees depends on where it looks. What a vocal signal means depends on who produced it and the interaction in which it occurs. Where an animal is—and where others are—changes the information available to the brain.
Our research therefore begins with behavior. Observations of marmosets in their natural habitat help identify the problems their brains actually solve. We then develop experimentally tractable versions of those behaviors in the laboratory, combining precise measurement of gaze, movement, social interaction and the sensory environment with recordings from neural populations.
The aim is not to abandon experimental control, but to bring control to behaviors that preserve the computational structure of the real-world problem.
Communication
We study how primate brains produce, perceive and coordinate natural social communication. Marmoset vocal interactions provide a model for examining turn-taking, social context, caller identity and the problem of following a particular individual when multiple animals are communicating at once.
Social Space
We study how the brain represents where I am, where others are, and who those others are. This work begins with hippocampal representations of an animal's own location during free navigation and extends to representations that combine the identity and spatial location of other individuals.
Active Vision
Vision is an active process. Primates continually move their eyes, head and body to determine what information reaches the brain. We study this process from prey capture in wild marmosets through freely moving eye tracking and visual-cortex recordings to hippocampal representations of saccade vectors that may contribute to transforming rapidly sampled visual information into representations of the world.