Cortical Microcolumns – New Scholar

We have a new scholar, Andrea Terlizzi, to investigate the role of cortical microcolumns as building blocks in the modularisation of multimodal task learning, such as words and images. Cortical microcolumns having been known for some time, the question of what makes them so uniquely favored in mammalian cortex is still unresolved. How does using the same neural “building block” across modalities like early vision, object recognition, motor cortex or executive function contribute towards efficiency and precision in sensorimotor loops? How do the classes of neurons involved contribute to this? We want to analyse how we can store feature-based semantics and pictures of objects in such a setting, and how multimodal higher-level categories develop. Answering such questions has applications in aphasia, schizophrenia, dementia, as well as speech therapy and language learning.