About

Dr. Michael Goard received his B.A. in Psychology from Reed College and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he developed approaches for imaging and manipulating the activity of large populations of neurons in behaving mice. He joined the faculty of UC Santa Barbara in 2016 as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences. His research focuses on understanding how the mammalian neocortex processes and stores incoming sensory information. His lab employs large-scale two-photon calcium imaging, multi-unit electrophysiology, and optogenetic manipulation of neural activity in behaving mice to investigate the neural circuitry underlying perceptual and cognitive abilities.

Research topics

• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Biology
• Chemistry
• Cognitive psychology

Selected publications

• Stimulus-dependent representational drift in primary visual cortex

  Nature Communications · 2021 · 165 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Neuroscience
  • Cognitive psychology

  To produce consistent sensory perception, neurons must maintain stable representations of sensory input. However, neurons in many regions exhibit progressive drift across days. Longitudinal studies have found stable responses to artificial stimuli across sessions in visual areas, but it is unclear whether this stability extends to naturalistic stimuli. We performed chronic 2-photon imaging of mouse V1 populations to directly compare the representational stability of artificial versus naturalistic visual stimuli over weeks. Responses to gratings were highly stable across sessions. However, neural responses to naturalistic movies exhibited progressive representational drift across sessions. Differential drift was present across cortical layers, in inhibitory interneurons, and could not be explained by differential response strength or higher order stimulus statistics. However, representational drift was accompanied by similar differential changes in local population correlation structure. These results suggest representational stability in V1 is stimulus-dependent and may relate to differences in preexisting circuit architecture of co-tuned neurons.

  DOI

• Distributed and retinotopically asymmetric processing of coherent motion in mouse visual cortex

  Nature Communications · 2020 · 62 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Neuroscience
  • Biology
  • Chemistry

  Perception of visual motion is important for a range of ethological behaviors in mammals. In primates, specific visual cortical regions are specialized for processing of coherent visual motion. However, whether mouse visual cortex has a similar organization remains unclear, despite powerful genetic tools available for measuring population neural activity. Here, we use widefield and 2-photon calcium imaging of transgenic mice to measure mesoscale and cellular responses to coherent motion. Imaging of primary visual cortex (V1) and higher visual areas (HVAs) during presentation of natural movies and random dot kinematograms (RDKs) reveals varied responsiveness to coherent motion, with stronger responses in dorsal stream areas compared to ventral stream areas. Moreover, there is considerable anisotropy within visual areas, such that neurons representing the lower visual field are more responsive to coherent motion. These results indicate that processing of visual motion in mouse cortex is distributed heterogeneously both across and within visual areas.

  DOI

• Dysfunction of cortical GABAergic neurons leads to sensory hyper-reactivity in a Shank3 mouse model of ASD

  Nature Neuroscience · 2020 · 198 citations

  • Neuroscience
  • Psychology
  • Medicine
  DOI

Recent grants

• Dissection of the neural circuitry of short-term memory in behaving mice

  NIH · $130k · 2014–2016

• Cortical visual processing for navigation

  NIH · $1.9M · 2021–2026

• Dissection of the neural circuitry of short-term memory in behaving mice

  NIH · $747k · 2016–2020

• Modulation of cortical processing by engagement with the sensory environment

  NIH · $74k · 2013–2016

• NIH Grant F31NS059258

  NIH · $43k · 2010

Frequent coauthors

• Guoping Feng

  Broad Institute

  15 shared

• William T. Redman

  12 shared

• Kevin K. Sit

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  11 shared

• Gerald N. Pho

  10 shared

• Tyler D. Marks

  California Institute of Technology

  9 shared

• Zhanyan Fu

  McGovern Institute for Brain Research

  8 shared

• Mriganka Sur

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  7 shared

• Yang Dan

  University of California, Berkeley

  7 shared

Labs

• Michael Jacobs Goard LabPI

Education

• B.A., Psychology

  Reed College

• Ph.D., Neuroscience

  University of California, Berkeley

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