Research

Our basic research goal is to understand the basic units of information processing in the brain. In order to explore the underlying universal principles we focus on sensory systems in the animal world. We search for systems that are on the one hand simple enough to allow a thorough understanding of the system, but on the other hand complex enough to show interesting behavior. In this way, we try to identify fundamental processes that underlying information processing in the brain. Experimental verifiability always plays an important role in our research and we prefer to work together with experimentalists to get an optimal understanding of the problems we are dealing with.
In general, sensory processing can be understood in terms of three key concepts:

	Encoding How are particular object properties in the real world mapped onto the sensory system under consideration? And how are neuronal responses in terms of action potentials generated from the sensory input?
	Decoding How does the brain reconstruct relevant information from the temporal sequence of action potentials?
	Selforganisation of the system How can an organism learn to process spatio-temporal patterns in neuronal networks?

Achieving a mathematical understanding of these three key concepts is not only of scientific interest, but it also is a first step to technical applications.
Below you find links to further information or simply click on the images.

• Auditory Information Processing
• Prey localization of the clawed frog with the help of water waves.
• Prey localization of the desert scorpion
• Lizard Hearing
• Snake Infrared Vision
• Theory of Learning
• The Zwicker tone as an auditory illusion
• Substrate-based hearing in Snakes
• CILIA - Hairs detecting fluid motion

Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience - Munich (BCCN)

Customized Intelligent Life-inspired Arrays (CILIA)

Cognition in Technical Sysems (CoTeSys)

last modified 2010-07-06 by webmaster@Franosch.org