We said goodbye to our sweet pup Hobbes yesterday. We miss him so much.

If saccades responses were primarily visually driven, we’d expect that saccade responsive neurons would have distinct visual responses from non-saccade responsive neurons. We did not find this when comparing things like direction selectivity, lifetime sparseness, etc.

Perhaps the most surprising thing we found was that there are nearly 5X more neurons that respond to temporal saccades than to nasal saccades. This seems really interesting to us, and we think it’s related to orienting behaviors of the mouse, but we don’t know.

9% of neurons in this dataset had significant responses to saccades. Most show enhanced responses, some are suppressed after saccades, and many are direction selective, responding only when the saccade is in the temporal or the nasal direction, but not both.

We analyzed over 800 experiment sessions from this dataset from over 200 mice and identified saccades from the eye position traces. We had expected to find that mice made more saccades during some visual stimuli than others, but this was not the case.

The Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain has wrapped up. A wonderful two weeks of computational #neuroscience with open data!

Excited to be heading up to Friday Harbor for our annual Summer Workshop on the Dynamic Brain. It’s a little smokey, but should clear up soon. Looking forward to working with students on some exciting science! #neuroscience