@ Michael Yassa, Ph.D.Associate Dean, Professor, & DirectorUniversity of California, Irvine Episodic Memory, Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease Memory is the sum of who we are. We strive to understand how brains can learn and remember information and in using this knowledge to improve the human condition. In particular, we focus on how our memory abilities change […]

@ Peter Rudebeck, Ph.D.Associate Professor of Neuroscience and PsychiatryIcahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Prefrontal and limbic mechanisms of reward-guided decision-making and affect How do we decide what to pursue and how do we update our decisions as our wants and needs change? In our daily lives, our brains are constantly having to learn […]

@ Greg DeAngelis, Ph.D.Professor of Brain and Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Biomedical Engineering School or Arts and Sciences: Brain and Cognitive SciencesUniversity of Rochester How the brain computes object motion and depth during self-motion Primate visual motion processing has provided a powerful model system for studying the neural basis of perception, decision-making, and action planning.  […]

@ Marc Sommer, Ph.D. Professor of Biomedical Engineering Duke University Faculty Host: Dr. Hey-Kyoung Lee Neural mechanisms for visual continuity across eye movements Abstract: Moving while sensing the world provides animals with quick, efficient behaviors but introduces big challenges for perception. The nervous system must distinguish sensory inputs caused by external agents from spurious inputs […]

@ Anna Schapiro, Ph.D.Assistant Professor Department of PsychologyUniversity of Pennsylvania Faculty Host: Dr. Chris Fetsch Learning representations of specifics and generalities over time There is a fundamental tension between storing discrete traces of individual experiences, which allows recall of particular moments in our past without interference, and extracting regularities across these experiences, which supports generalization […]

@ Jeremy D. Brown, Ph.D.Assistant Professor Department of Engineering @ Whiting School of EngineeringJohns Hopkins University Restoring dexterity in telerobotics: An engineer’s journey into neuroscience The human body can perform dexterous manipulation across a variety of environments. However, some environments present challenges due to limitations in function, distance, and scale. In many of these cases, […]

@ Roozbeh Kiani, M.D., Ph.D.Professor of Neural Science and Psychology New York University Flexible decision-making: policies and rules I will explore two core principles of circuit models for perceptual decisions. In these models, neural ensembles that encode actions compete to form decisions. Consequently, representation and readout of the decision variables (DVs) in these models are […]

@ Jeanne Paz, Ph.D.Assistant Professor, Neurology UCSF Weill Institute for NeurosciencesUniversity of California, San Francisco Deconstructing GABAergic circuits in the thalamus and their role in regulating thalamocortical function The reticular thalamic nucleus (nRT) is involved in perception, sensation, attention, consciousness and in generation of sleep spindle oscillations in thalamocortical networks. The nRT provides the GABAergic […]

@ Kalanit Grill-Spector, Ph.D. Professor in Psychology Department of Psychology School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University The future of human vision: a cognitive computational neuroanatomical approach to study the human visual system fMRI and computational modeling have transformed our understanding of the human brain. In the visual system, modeling population receptive fields (pRF) […]

@ Cristina Savin, Ph.D. Associate Professor Neural Science and Data Science New York University Center for Neural Science Representing beliefs in a changing world One constant of brain computation is that nothing is ever constant. As the state of the world changes the brain needs to constantly adapt to it at many different time scales. […]

@ Timothy Buschman, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Psychology Princeton University The geometry of cognitive flexibility Humans and animals are remarkably good at multi-tasking: we quickly learn many different tasks and flexibly switch between them. Theoretical work suggests such cognitive flexibility requires representing the current task and then using this task representation to selectively engage […]