Neuroscience Symposium – Prof. Dr. Stefan Treue

Attention to visual motion: shaping sensation into perception.

Guest speaker:
Prof Dr. Stefan Treue
Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
German Primate Center – Leibniz Institute for Primate Research, Göttingen, Germany

Abstract:
Evolution has endowed primates, including humans, with a powerful visual system,
seemingly providing us with a detailed perception of our surroundings. But in reality, the underlying process is one of active filtering, enhancement, and reshaping. For visual motion perception, the dorsal pathway in primate visual cortex, and in particular area MT/V5 is considered to be of critical importance. Combining physiological and psychophysical approaches, we have used the processing and perception of visual motion and area MT/V5 as a model for the interaction of sensory (bottom-up) signals with cognitive (top-down) modulatory influences that characterizes visual perception. Our findings document how this interaction enables visual cortex to actively generate a neural representation of the environment that combines the high-performance sensory periphery with selective modulatory influences to produce an “integrated saliency map’ of the environment.

Short bio:
Prof. Dr. Stefan Treue studied biology in Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and at Duke University (USA). He obtained his PhD in Systems Neuroscience from MIT (Cambridge, USA) in 1992. After research in Houston and Tübingen and his habilitation in animal physiology, he became Director of the German Primate Center in Göttingen and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Biopsychology at the University of Göttingen in 2001. His research focuses on the neuronal mechanisms of visual perception in rhesus monkeys and humans, with an additional focus on scientific studies on the welfare of nonhuman primates in neuroscience research.

Stefan Treue is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences and of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. In 2010, he was awarded the Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG), one of Germany’s most prestigious science prizes, for his research on visual attention.

Stefan Treue is an outspoken advocate for responsible animal research as an essential method in biomedical research. He is a member of the Committee on Animals in Research of the DFG, and speaker of Tierversuche verstehen (www.tierversuche-verstehen.de), a national initiative to improve transparency and communication about animal research.