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.
We additionally encourage applications for projects which explicitly (collaboration/tandem) or conceptually:
7) foster close interaction of experimental research performed in different sensory systems within the proposed SPP,
8) foster close interaction of experimental and theoretical / computational research within the proposed SPP.
We discourage applications for projects which:
1) are not focused on the topic of cortico-subcortical interactions as described above and in the research themes (https://www.brainloops.de/research-themes),
2) aim at anatomical characterizations of the circuit without functional measurements of brain activity,
3) probe (sample and/or manipulate) activity only from a single structure without sampling/manipulating a second brain area,
4) focus on disease mechanisms or knock-out animals,
5) focus on the role of cortico-subcortical circuits outside sensory/perceptual processing,
6) have a pure computational/theoretical focus without concrete modeling of experimental data or without the aim of providing mechanistic insight into cortico-subcortical information processing,
7) work on non-mammalian model systems.