The origins and adaptive significance of music, long an elusive target, are now active topics of empirical study. I argue that empirical results can constrain discussions of the adaptive significance of music by testing ...

Studies in the past decade have established gene expression as an inherently variable process. Accompanying this exciting finding is a fundamental question: how do physiological events, such as cell fate specification, ...

To what extent can experience shape perception? In what ways does perception vary across people or even within the same person at different times? This thesis presents three lines of research examining the role of experience ...

The mammalian superior colliculus (SC) coordinates visual, somatosensory, and auditory stimuli to guide animal behavior. The superficial layers (sSC) receive visual information via two major afferent projections: 1) A ...

The ease with which we recognize visual objects belies the computational difficulty of this feat. Despite the concerted efforts of both biological and computer vision research communities over the last forty years, human-level ...

This thesis describes the use of mathematical, statistical, and computational methods to analyze, in two paradigmatic areas, what the hippocampus and associated structures do, and how they do it. The first model explores ...

Modification of synapses by neural activity has been proposed to be the substrate for experience-dependent brain development, learning, and recovery of function after brain damage. In the visual cortex, the strength of ...