Stefan Treue

Professor, Director of the German Primate Center

Head of the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory
Ph.D. 1992, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Postdoctoral Fellow, MIT, 1992 - 1993
Postdoctoral Fellow, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, 1993 - 1995
Work Group Leader, Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Univ. of Tübingen, 1995 - 2001
Professor of Animal Physiology, Univ. of Tübingen, 2000 - 2001
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Biological Psychology, Univ. of Göttingen, 2001

Major Research Interests:

Stefan Treue

Research at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory is aimed at understanding the neural basis of visual perception. Vision is an active process that is far more than a passive registration of our environment. Rather, on its way from the eyes to and through the cortex, visual information is modulated by numerous processes that enhance some aspects while diminishing others. One of these processes is attention, i.e. the ability to filter out unwanted information and concentrate the brain´s processing abilities on relevant information.

The accurate representation of visual motion in the environment is one of the most important tasks of the visual system. Correspondingly research in the laboratory concentrates on this ability as a model for sensory information processing in general.

We use various techniques. While our emphasize is on electrophysiology, i.e. the recording of the activity of neurons in the visual cortex of macaque monkeys and measuring human perceptual abilities with psychophysical methods we also use theoretical approaches and are planning to use functional brain imaging in the future.
Using these techniques, we have been able to elucidate how motion information is represented in primate cortical area MT and how attention changes that representation and correspondingly the percept of the visual environment.

Address:
German Primate Center
Kellnerweg 4
37077 Göttingen
Germany

phone: +49-551-38 51115
fax: +49-551-38 51183
e-mail:

Further Information:
http://www.dpz.gwdg.de/
akn/

Selected Recent Publications:

Treue S and Maunsell J H R (1996) Attentional modulation of visual motion processing in cortical areas MT and MST. Nature 382 (6591): 539-541

Treue S and Martinez Trujillo J C (1999) Feature-based attention influences motion processing gain in macaque visual cortex. Nature 399 (6736): 575-579

Treue S, Hol K and Rauber H J (2000) Seeing multiple directions of motion - Physiology and psychophysics. Nature Neuroscience 3 (3): 270-276

Martinez-Trujillo J C and Treue S (2002) Attentional modulation strength in cortical area MT depends on stimulus contrast. Neuron 35: 365-370

Hol K and Treue S (2001) Different populations of neurons contribute to the detection and discrimination of visual motion. Vision Research 41(6): 685-689

Treue S (2001) Neural correlates of attention in primate visual cortex. Trends in Neurosciences 24 (5): 295-300