Curious, cooperative, and communicative: How we learn from others and help others learn

Humans are not the only species that learns from others, but only humans learn and communicate in rich, diverse social contexts, and build repertoires of abstract, structured knowledge. What makes human social learning so distinctive, powerful, and smart?  In this talk, I argue that social learning is inferential at its core (inferential social learning); rather than copying what others do or trusting what others say, humans learn from others by drawing rich inferences from others’ behaviors, and help others learn by generating evidence tailored to others’ goals and knowledge states.

Neural correlates of flexible cognition

Abstract: New probes now allow high density recordings of activity in primates. We report on findings from two collaborations with the Buffalo lab in which primates were trained to perform complex tasks, in which we explore the emergence of schemas. In the first study, macaque monkeys navigated in a visually rich virtual reality environment. We find that while many neurons in hippocampus show place-like responses, the population as a whole tends to primarily encode relevant task epochs.

What Happened to the 'Mental' in 'Mental" Disorders

People often seek help for mental problems because they are suffering subjectively. Yet, for decades, the subjective experience of patients has been marginalized. This is in part due to the dominant medical model of mental illness, which has tended to treat subjective experience as a quaint relic of a scientifically less enlightened time. To the extent that subjective symptoms are related to the underlying problem, it is often assumed that they will be taken care of if the more objective symptoms, such as behavioral and physiological responses are treated.

CANCELLED - How do natural neuronal networks deal with noise?

The retina is a dense layered network of neurons that transforms incoming light from visual scenes into noisy spiking activity. This transformation is highly non-linear and has not been fully characterized yet. In particular, the activity of the different output neurons is noisy and correlated. There is at the moment no consensus on the extent and purpose of the correlations observed in the population response, some studies stating that they can be beneficial whilst others showing otherwise. In this talk I will discuss some recent results to answer this question.

Rethinking behavior in the light of evolution

Abstract: In psychology and neuroscience, the human brain is usually described as an information processing system that encodes and manipulates representations of knowledge to produce plans of action. This view leads to a decomposition of brain functions into putative processes such as object recognition, memory, decision-making, action planning, etc., inspiring the search for the neural correlates of these processes. However, neurophysiological data does not support many of the predictions of these classic subdivisions.

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