Alumni Team "Cortical Architecture, Coding and Perception"

The brain is composed of different anatomical pathways that link different brain regions, in order to establish channels of communication/interaction between them. I have developed my scientific activity in the field of neuroanatomy and cortical network, in particular in the study of cortico-cortical and subcortical-cortical connectivity in the macaque by the use of fluorescent retrograde tracers. These markers are injected in different cortical areas and are actively transported from the axon terminals to the cell bodies of the neurons distributed throughout the cortex and subcortical structures that project to the injected regions. Quantifying the number of cell bodies in each region that project to the cortical area under study allows to obtain a measure of the "weight" of each projection. The identification of the layers of the cortex where the cell bodies of neurons are (supragranular vs. infragranular layers) allows us to classify each of these projections as "feedforward", "feedback" or “lateral” projection. The study of these two parameters ("weight" and projection type), couple with the study of the directionality of each projection as well their symmetry, allows us to study the cortical network architecture, in particular its density and its hierarchy.