Nathan Dayie "completes the circuit" with friend, Raine Gibson at URCAD!
Nathan is a URA, U-RISE, and Meyerhoff Scholar. He will recieve a $100 gift certificate to the UMBC Bookstore!! He presented an oral talk on:
Investigating Neural and Behavioral Correlates Underlying Sensory Integration in Marmosets
Mentor: Guoping Feng, Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Abstract:
Atypical sensory processing is a hallmark of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder, yet the neural and behavioral correlates associated with this deficit remain poorly understood. To investigate the mechanisms underlying sensory integration, we implemented a free-response version of a pulse-based evidence accumulation task in a non-human primate model, marmosets. The task presents sensory information in a sequence of flashes on either side of a screen, while freely moving marmosets choose the side with higher flash probability to receive a reward. We used the task, neural recordings, pose estimation, and computational models to investigate the process of sensory integration. In this study, we propose a multi-modal data alignment pipeline to integrate neural and behavioral data. Each session includes 3D-pose estimation extracted from five cameras, task performance data, and single-unit neural recordings. The pipeline successfully synchronizes neural spiking with task events and video, enabling qualitative insights regarding spike timing correlations with screen flashes and reward delivery. These results validate the pipeline’s utility for uncovering neural correlates underlying sensory integration. Future work will integrate computational models to quantify these correlations. We hope this framework will provide a foundation for studying sensory processing deficits across marmoset models of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Save the date for URCAD 31:
April 28, 2027
UR.umbc.edu