@ Erin Hecht, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Department of Human Evolutionary BiologyHarvard University Brain-behavior evolution in domesticated canids How do animals evolve new behavioral adaptations? Domestication offers a unique window into this question because it can involve strong selection pressure on a focused set of behaviors. In one set of studies, we are comparing brains of foxes […]
@ Jan Engelmann, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Dept. of PsychologyUniversity of California, Berkeley The sense of fairness in chimpanzees and children It is often argued that the sense of fairness consists in an aversion to unequal resource distributions. Standard accounts claim that chimpanzees react negatively to allocations in which they receive less than others, while children, from […]
@ Terrence R. Stanford, Ph.D.Professor, Translational NeuroscienceWake Forest University School of Medicine Imposing urgency to generate insights into the neural mechanisms of perceptual decision-making and motor choice One of the most ubiquitous choices we make is that of where to look next. At 3-5 saccadic eye movements every second, the primate oculomotor system provides a […]
@ Elizabeth Quinlan, Ph.D.Professor and Chair, Department of NeuroscienceHerman and Rubinstein Chair of NeuroscienceUniversity of Wisconsin – Madison TBD Faculty Host: Hey-Kyoung Lee Add to calendar Google Calendar iCalendar Outlook 365 Outlook Live
@ Vincent Costa, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Division of NeuroscienceOregon National Primate Research CenterOregon Health & Science University Disynaptic motivational circuits regulate decisions to explore or exploit Motivational circuits facilitate reinforcement learning and support computations relevant for solving the explore-exploit dilemma. But it has been difficult to dissect the neural circuits involved in exploration, since these choices […]
@ Hiroyuki Kato, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorDepartment of Psychiatry & Neuroscience CenterUniversity of North Carolina Chapel Hill Sensory Integration along the Auditory Cortical Hierarchy Our brain’s ability to parse overlapping sounds and reconstruct individual perceptual sound objects is essential in navigating acoustically complex environments. Despite ample evidence suggesting the critical roles of higher-order auditory cortices in integrating […]
@ Stefan Mihalas, Ph.D.InvestigatorAllen Institute for Brain Science Computing with complex components: How heterogeneous, nonstationary and noisy neurons and synapses contribute to the brain’s computational power While artificial neural networks have taken inspiration from biological ones, one salient difference exists at the level of components. Artificial networks are generally built with homogeneous, stationary and deterministic […]
Neural Mechanisms Underlying Adult Ocular Dominance Plasticity: Hebbian or Homeostatic? @ Daniel Tso, PhDAssociate Professor of Neurosurgery,Neuroscience and Physiology,& Ophthalmology and Visual SciencesSUNY Upstate Medical UniversitySyracuse, NY Recent studies in adult humans have shown that short-term deprivation of one eye (STMD, 1-3hrs) dramatically shifts the balance in favor of this eye for over an hour […]
@ Reza Shadmehr, Ph.D.Professor, Dept of Biomedical EngineeringJohns Hopkins University A vector calculus for neural computation in the cerebellum: Neurons in the brain are active not just during execution of a behavior, but also before its onset and after its conclusion. The leading theory that explains the meaning of these activities is that of null […]
@ Thorsten Kahnt, Ph.D.Chief, Learning and Decision-Making UnitNational Institute on Drug Abuse Orbitofrontal contributions to outcome-guided behavior Research across species has shown that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is critical for decision making. However, it is less clear what exactly the OFC is contributing to this function. I will present work using functional neuroimaging showing that […]
@ Robbe Goris, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology University of Texas at Austin Title: Inference and introspection in the primate visual system To accomplish goals, humans and other animals must infer properties of theenvironment in the face of uncertainty and change. I will discuss psychophysical, physiological,and theoretical work from my lab that interrogates the computational […]
@ Lydia Hopper, Ph.D.Associate Professor, Department of Molecular & Comparative PathobiologyJohns Hopkins School of Medicine Title: Copy cats and aping apes: How social learning aids knowledge acquisition and the transmission of behavioral traditions Abstract: From ants to zebras, animals are influenced by the behavior of others. At the simplest level, social support can reduce neophobia, […]
