The doors of perception: selective processing of behaviourally relevant information during sensory-guided decision-making

Rewards are the key driving forces of our decisions. Sensory stimuli with
greater reward value engage more of our attention, biasing our perception
and senses. I aim to investigate how the primary visual cortex, one of the
first stages of visual processing in the brain, filters incoming information in
decision-making. Firstly, I will examine how learning the reward value of a
visual stimulus can re-organise the connections between neurons, i.e. the
basic working units of the brain, in the mouse visual cortex. Secondly, I aim
to determine how the reward context influences visual processing. Reward
context is crucial for our choices because what matters most in decision
making is the value of each option relative to those of the alternatives. I
will apply a combination of neurophysiological and modelling techniques
to answer the above questions in health and schizophrenia, a psychiatric
disease associated with abnormal reward processing