Neuroscientist Qi Wang will present “Thalamic Synchrony and Adaptive Tradeoff Between Detection and Discrimination in Behavior” at Northern Michigan University. The presentation will begin at 2 p.m. Friday, Feb. 20, in Mead Auditorium in the West Science Building. It is free and open to the public.

Wang is an assistant professor in the department of biomedical engineering at Columbia University. He will present on a series of experiments he conducted on rats, which provided direct behavioral evidence for the trade-off between detectability and discriminability in the thalamus and cortex. It was long thought that sensory adaption serves to enhance information flow in sensory pathways, but his research further proved that this tradeoff can be modulated through sensory adaption.

This neuroscience colloquium is sponsored by the NMU department of psychology and neuroscience. For more information, call 227-2935.