Vivien Casagrande, Ph.D., professor of Cell Biology, Psychology, and Ophthalmology and a Kennedy Center investigator, was an invited speaker at the Cajal Club/Cajal Institute International Conference, May 25-27, in Madrid.
The meeting brought together leading neuroscience researchers in a variety of complementary areas to discuss their own research contributions to the changing concept of the neuron, first formulated by Santiago-Ramon y Cajal.
Casagrande presented “Static and Dynamic Views of Visual Cortical Organization,” in the session on “Complex Neuronal Connections and Organization.” Casagrande indicated that although it was known at the time of Cajal that the outside world was topographically mapped onto the visual cortex, no knowledge existed about the receptive fields of individual neurons or how sensory quality might be represented by cortical neurons. Data from Casagrande’s lab and from others provide evidence that some of the maps of stimulus features are not stable but are dynamic on a very short time scale.