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 from […]
Joshua Neunuebel, Ph.D.Associate Professor, Dept. of Psychological & Brain SciencesUniversity of Delaware Decoding Mouse Ultrasonic Communication During Social Behavior Communication plays an integral role in human social dynamics, and a myriad of neurodevelopmental disorders are characterized by abnormal social communication. Because of their genetic tractability, mice are emerging as an important model system for studying […]
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 around […]
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 unique […]
Elizabeth Quinlan, Ph.D.Professor and Chair, Department of NeuroscienceHerman and Rubinstein Chair of NeuroscienceUniversity of Wisconsin - Madison TBD Faculty Host: Hey-Kyoung Lee
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 rely […]
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 complex […]
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 neurons […]
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 afterwards. […]
Giorgio Ascoli, Ph.D.Distinguished University Professor, Bioengineering Department and Neuroscience ProgramFounding Director, Center for Neural Informatics, Structure, & PlasticityKrasnow Institute for Advanced StudyGeorge Mason University From Neuron Classification to Spiking Neural Network Simulations: Testing the textbook hypotheses of neuroscience with data-driven computational models Faculty Host: Jim Knierim
Value-based cognition: reward, computation, learning and problem-solving Many of our daily decisions are related to value. Choosing between food options, doingmathematic calculations, and learning something new, all of these procedures arelinked to value in different ways. In a series of research, we used neuroimaging (fMRIand MEG) in humans and single-neuron recordings in rhesus macaque monkeys, […]
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 spaces. […]
