NEURO-CONNECT Tuesday Seminar – April 15th, 12:15 – 13:15 pm

Dear all,

You are cordially invited to the next NEURO-Connect seminar, which will take place on April 15th at 12:15 at Campus Biotech.

The NEURO-Connect seminars aim at presenting different areas of the neuroscience community in Campus Biotech, ranging from cognition and emotion to neurobiology and neuroengineering, with the support of all institutions active on the site, including the UNIGE (NEUFO, CISA, FPSE), NCCR Evolving Language, EPFL (Neuro-X), HUG, CIBM and Wyss Center, and with the support of the Fondation Campus Biotech Geneva.

The next session will be hosted by CISA . The speaker will be Prof. John O’Doherty (California Institute of Technology), with the talk “The brain as a mixture of experts: the neurocomputational basis of multiple parallel systems for learning and control”. Please see abstract and other details below.

Private meetings with Prof. O’Doherty can be organized, and early career researchers (ECR, e.g., doctoral and postdoctoral) are encouraged to join the invited speaker for a networking lunch offered by the FCBG (10 spots, first-come, first-served). To indicate your wish to meet one-to-one with Prof. O’Doherty, or to register for the ECR lunch after the talk, please fill-in the following survey until Wednesday April 15th: Lunch registration. This delay is needed to be able to properly organize the schedule and to order the correct number of meals in time. We thank you for your cooperation.

Doctoral students can receive credits for their attendance, please don’t forget to have your attendance sheet signed.

For any questions on this event, you can contact the session organizers at cristina.soriano@unige.ch.

Looking forward to seeing you at NEURO-Connect.

The organizing team

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NEURO-CONNECT seminars
Tuesday, April 15th
12:15
Campus Biotech, H8-01-D

Prof. John O’Doherty (California Institute of Technology)

The brain as a mixture of experts: the neurocomputational basis of multiple parallel systems for learning and control

It has long been suggested that human behavior can be understood as reflecting the contributions of multiple systems that cooperate or compete for the control of behavior. Here we suggest that the brain can be thought of as a “Mixture of Experts” in which multiple different expert systems propose strategies for action. Here I will consider how the brain determines which system should control behavior at any one moment in time. It will be argued that this is accomplished by keeping track of the reliability of the predictions within each system, and by allocating control over behavior in a manner that is proportional to the relative reliability of those predictions. I will present behavioral evidence for the existence of a reliability-based control mechanism operating over multiple experts in humans. These include model-based and model-free reinforcement-learning strategies that learn to select actions on the basis of direct experience, experts that learn to select actions through observing the behavior of other agents, as well as a system that reflexively takes actions based solely on visual affordances. I will then present some neuroimaging and neurostimulation data that suggest a specific contribution of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in this reliability-based arbitration process. Results from the study of different expert systems in both experiential and social-learning domains hints at the possibility that this reliability-based control mechanism is domain general, exerting control over many different expert systems simultaneously in order to yield sophisticated behavior.

Zoom:https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85214333449?pwd=Gqyn4bGIaaQbQLeqL22s5ntA6bXM2m.1
Meeting ID: 852 1433 3449
Passcode: 725766

Disclaimer: the Neuro-Connect seminars are recorded. By participating, you authorize the possible capture and use of your image or voice in audiovisual recordings made during the event.