Cosyne 2007 Workshops
February 26-27, 2007
The Canyons, Utah
Workshop Title
Decision making
Organizer(s)
Julia Trommershaeuser (Giessen University): Julia.Trommershaeuser@psychol.uni-giessen.de
Alfonso Renart Fernandez (Rutgers): arenart@andromeda.rutgers.edu
Abstract
Recent methodological and computational advances have started to shed light into the process of how the brain encodes and uses noisy sensory information for guiding behavior. Decision-making research seeks to understand how perception is transformed into action, taking into account the fundamentally ambiguous representations that the brain constructs of the sensory environment, as well as the consequences of actions for the attainment of the current behavioral goals.
The wide scope of the enterprise has attracted attention from a broad range of disciplines. Workshop participants will address the role of reinforcement and implicit learning, the encoding of associative cues, the role of optimization principles for the shaping of behavior, and possible neuro-physiological implementations of these computations.
Speakers
8:30am: Yonatan Loewenstein, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Synaptic plasticity that is driven by the covariance of reward and neural activity may underlie the dynamics of learning behavior
9:15am: Paul E. M. Phillips, University of Washington: Encoding the "value" of future rewards by mesolimbic dopamine reflects benefits but not costs
10:00am: Leo Sugrue, Stanford University: Choosing the greater of two goods: neural currencies for valuation and choice
10:45am: Alex Huk, University of Texas at Austin: Neural time-integration for perceptual decision making
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4:00pm: Xiao-Jing Wang, Yale University School of Medicine: Stochastic decision making: Langevin versus Fokker-Planck
4:45pm: Wei-Ji Ma, University of Rochester: Optimal decision-making with probabilistic population codes
5:30pm: Konrad P. Körding, Northwestern University: Causal inference in the sensorimotor system
6:15pm: Denis Schluppeck, Nottingham University: Deciding where to look – Topographic areas of human posterior parietal cortex
