Patrick Williams

ARL Division of Neurobiology
Email: patrickw@email.arizona.edu
Office: (520) 621-9668
Lab: (520) 621-8383

Mailing Address:
1040 E. 4th Street
Gould Simpson Building Room 611
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721-0077

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RESEARCH INTERESTS

Two questions particularly drive my work: How is visual information represented in the brain? And how is that information transformed as it progresses through the brain to a point where it is behaviorally useful? To address these questions, I have worked with the visual systems of monkeys, humans, and now flies. Since these animals all have their own specialized behaviors, their visual systems also vary in a way that reflects their behavioral needs. All of these animals have extraordinarily complex visual systems; though the systems differ greatly, I believe that as challenges are conquered in one organism, they can be used to advance our understanding in others.

In my graduate work, I recorded the activity of individual neurons in the visual cortex of primates and found that an interesting change in representation occurs in the first visual area in cortex (V1). While neurons in input layers of V1 are most sensitive to the edges and borders of objects in a visual scene, it appears that many neurons in output layers have reached the first stages of representing complete objects. This is one of very few functional transformations between layers currently known to exist in V1.

At the University of Arizona, I am continuing to study how visual information is represented, specifically in the brains of flies. Many insects have interesting visual systems particularly because they must transform a complex visual world into useful information in relatively few steps. Nick Strausfeld and Jun-Ya Okamura recently discovered that part of the lateral protocerebrum in blowflies is organized into units that are reminiscent of the olfactory glomeruli in the antennal lobe. These optic glomeruli contain orientation-sensitive neurons, which are not known to exist elsewhere in the fly visual system but are common in mammals. My research is directed toward understanding the visual and possibly multi-modal functional organization of the optic glomeruli and the role that they play in transforming visual information in the fly.