Adam Kohn, Ph.D.

Professor, Dominick P. Purpura Department of Neuroscience
Professor, Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences
Professor, Departmen of Systems and Computational Biology
Isidor Tachna Professor in Ophthalmology

(neuroscience category)

My lab studies visual processing, with a focus on issues of rapid cortical plasticity, population coding, and inter-areal communication. We use neurophysiological, computational and behavioral methods in our work.

Our laboratory studies the neural circuits that underlie visual perception, a general issue that we approach from several directions. For instance, we study how the responsivity and tuning of cortical neurons is altered by recent stimulus history. This form of rapid plasticity—termed adaptation—has strong perceptual effects, allowing us to explore the neurophysiological underpinnings of perceptual phenomena. In addition, we are interested in understanding the functional benefit of adaptation and in learning how adaptation early in the visual system affects subsequent stages of processing. We hope that by understanding the principles of adaptation we will also gain insight into other forms of plasticity such as perceptual learning and recovery from injury. We also study how populations of neurons function together to encode information about the visual world. We record from small populations of neurons simultaneously and measure the correlation of their responses. In particular, we explore how correlation depends on stimulus parameters, recent stimulus history, and cortical location. The primary techniques of the lab are neurophysiological recordings, computational modeling, and psychophysics. We hope that employing a range of experimental techniques will help us understand the computations carried out by the visual system and the circuits that perform them.

Selected Publications

Coen-Cagli R, Kohn A*, Schwartz O* (2015) Flexible gating of contextual influences in natural vision. Nature Neuroscience 18: 1648–1655. *Equal contribution

Zandvakili A, Kohn A (2015) Coordinated neuronal activity enhances corticocortical communication. Neuron 87: 827–839.

Solomon SG, Kohn A (2014) Moving sensory adaptation beyond suppressive effects in single neurons. Current Biology 24: 1012–1022.

Czuba TB, Huk AC, Cormack LK, Kohn A (2014) Area MT encodes three-dimensional motion. Journal of Neuroscience 34: 15522–15533.

Patterson CA, Wissig SC, Kohn A (2014) Adaptation disrupts motion integration in the primate dorsal stream. Neuron 81: 674–686.

Jia X, Tanabe S, Kohn A (2013) Gamma and the coordination of spiking activity in early visual cortex. Neuron 77: 762–774.

Smith MA, Jia X, Zandvakili A, Kohn A (2013) Laminar dependence of neuronal correlations in visual cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology 109: 940–947.

Patterson CA, Wissig SC, Kohn A (2013) Distinct effects of brief and prolonged adaptation on orientation tuning in primary visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 33: 532–543.

Wissig SC, Kohn A (2012) The influence of surround suppression on adaptation effects in primary visual cortex. Journal of Neurophysiology 107: 3370–3384.

Cohen MC, Kohn A (2011) Measuring and interpreting neuronal correlations. Nature Neuroscience 14: 811–819.