Date: Friday, April 3,  2026
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: Simons Center Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom [https://mit.zoom.us/j/98510143434]

Speaker: Wenyu Tu,  Ph.D.
Affiliation: Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, Alan Jasanoff Laboratory, Department of Biological Engineering; McGovern Institute, MIT

Talk title: Neural correlates of visual behavior in normal and ASD-model marmosets

Abstract: Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are often accompanied by abnormalities in visual behavior and attention. I will present an ongoing project that applies functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study brain-wide neural mechanisms that underlie these phenomena in wild type marmosets and in SHANK3 hemizygous knockouts that model a monogenic ASD. Animals were scanned during resting conditions, video presentation with social and neutral stimuli, and a binocular rivalry-based attention task. Initial data are being analyzed to characterize how task and behavioral variables are represented by regional activity profiles and how these parameters differ between wild type and mutant subjects. Preliminary results suggest that aspects of behavior, visual fMRI responses, and functional connectivity are altered in mutant animals, and the data also begin to suggest neural signatures of stimulus tracking in the attentional task. We aim to use the imaging findings to target a novel circuit-specific fMRI probe that will provide information about information flow during the attentional paradigms. I will describe efforts to establish this method using viral vectors in marmosets.