Neuromatch Academy: Teaching Computational Neuroscience with Global Accessibility

Neuromatch Academy (NMA) designed and ran a fully online 3-week Computational Neuroscience Summer School for 1757 students with 191 teaching assistants (TAs) working in virtual inverted (or flipped) classrooms and on small group projects. Fourteen languages, active community management, and low cost allowed for an unprecedented level of inclusivity and universal accessibility

Frontiers in Neural Circuits

Traditionally, functional representations in early visual areas are conceived as retinotopic maps preserving ego-centric spatial location information while ensuring that other stimulus features are uniformly represented for all locations in space. Recent results challenge this framework of relatively independent encoding of location and features in the early visual system, emphasizing location-dependent feature sensitivities that reflect specialization of cortical circuits for different locations in visual space. Here we review the evidence for such location-specific encoding including: (1) systematic variation of functional properties within conventional retinotopic maps in the cortex; (2) novel periodic retinotopic transforms that dramatically illustrate the tight linkage of feature sensitivity, spatial location, and cortical circuitry; and (3) retinotopic biases in cortical areas, and groups of areas, that have been defined by their functional specializations. We propose that location-dependent feature sensitivity is a fundamental organizing principle of the visual system that achieves efficient representation of positional regularities in visual experience, and reflects the evolutionary selection of sensory and motor circuits to optimally represent behaviorally relevant information. Future studies are necessary to discover mechanisms underlying joint encoding of location and functional information, how this relates to behavior, emerges during development, and varies across species

Visual Neuroscience

The purpose of this brief communication is to make publicly available three unpublished manuscripts on the organization of retinal ganglion cells in the tree shrew. The manuscripts were authored in 1986 by Dr. Edward DeBruyn, a PhD student in the laboratory of the late Dr. Vivien Casagrande at Vanderbilt University. As diurnal animals closely related to primates, tree shrews are ideally suited for comparative analyses of visual structures including the retina. We hope that providing this basic information in a citable form inspires other groups to pursue further characterization of the tree shrew retina using modern techniques