Inclusion and exclusion criteria
The following criteria are necessary for inclusion of projects in the selection process. Applying projects must:
1) study or model the function of mammalian corticofugal connections with the goal of characterizing the impact of such input on subcortical sensory structures, for example on the feed-forward transformation of information,
2) measure or model neuronal activity on a microcircuit level (for example cell type-, column- and/ or layer-specificity) in awake mammals,
3) study or model the dynamics of cortico-subcortical loops according to one or more of the three themes suggested: context-dependency, prediction and attention, learning and plasticity,
4) simultaneously probe (sample and/or manipulate) or model activity in two or more interacting cortico-subcortical structures, where at least one is a sensory structure,
5) study or model circuit function through behavioral or neural activity manipulations,
6) have a clear plan for sharing data, analysis software and models.