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Ma lab's letter to President Obama about the BRAIN Initative

Research

We investigate the mechanisms of brain function at the systems level; this means that we are interested in the behavior of an organism and the activity of large groups of neurons underlying behavior. We focus on the neural processes underlying perception. Animals receive perceptual information through their senses. This information comes with uncertainty because of omnipresent noise and ambiguity. The brain has to represent and process uncertain information in order for the organism to function effectively. We aim to understand this representation and processing in the context of behaviorally interesting tasks. Current projects in the lab study visual search, visual short-term memory, multisensory integration, and categorization. In our work, we use mathematical analysis, computer simulations, and theory-driven human behavioral experiments (psychophysics). Read more about our projects on the Research page.

Research keywords

Psychophysics, mathematical modeling, neural networks. Bayesian inference, probability, uncertainty, population coding. Visual perception, multisensory perception, decision-making, visual short-term memory, visual search, attention.

Teaching

Wei Ji taught the first half of Theoretical Neuroscience: Learning, Perception, Cognition in January-Feburary 2013. Class materials are available here.

Community

If you are interested in working in the lab, contact us. We regularly have opportunities at various levels. We welcome students and researchers with a background in computational neuroscience, physics, engineering, computer science, mathematics, or a related discipline.

If you want to know more about the PhD Program in Neuroscience, go here.

We are affiliated with the BCM PhD Program in Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics, the Gulf Coast Consortium for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, and the Department of Psychology at Rice University.