Leslie Kay

Leslie Kay, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology
Committee on Neurobiology
Committee on Computational Neuroscience

Lab web page

Perceptual physiology of olfactory and limbic systems.

My laboratory studies behavioral neurophysiology of the distributed olfactory and limbic systems. The questions we address concern perception and meaning, using olfactory behavior and learning as a model system. We have shown that activity from the limbic system and other parts of the brain strongly influences that seen in the most peripheral structure of the olfactory system, the olfactory bulb. This suggests that the personal and internal states of an animal influence sensory processing at a very early stage. Experiments involve both behavior and electrophysiology in rodents (rats and mice), utilizing simultaneous single cell, multi-cell, and population recordings in olfactory and limbic areas, while animals learn and perform olfactory discrimination tasks. We use both standard linear methods as well as dynamical analysis to interpret interactions among brain areas during perception and learning.

References

Kay, L.M. (2003) A challenge to chaotic itinerancy from brain dynamics. Chaos 13(3); in press.

Kay, L.M., Lowry, C.A., Jacobs, H.A. (2003) Receptor contributions to configural and elemental odor mixture perception. Behavioral Neuroscience, 117(5); in press.

Kay, L.M. (2003) Two species of gamma oscillations in the olfactory bulb: dependence on behavioral state and synaptic interactions. J. Integrative Neurosci. 2(1) 31-44.

Nusser, Z., Kay, L.M., Laurent, G., Homanics, G.E., Mody, I. (2001) Disruption of GABAA receptor-mediated inhibition of GABAergic interneurons leads to increased synchrony of the olfactory bulb network. J. Neurophysiology, 86(6): 2823-2833.

Kay, L.M. and Laurent, G. (1999) Odor- and context-dependent modulation of mitral cell firing in behaving rats. Nature Neurscience, 2(11): 1003-1009.
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Last updated 08/03/06