This seminar will be held in the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia's Manhattanville campus (9th floor lecture hall). Columbia University's Intercampus Shuttle Service is the best way to travel between campuses.

Understanding how social influence shapes biological processes is a central challenge in contemporary science, essential for achieving progress in a variety of fields ranging from the organization and evolution of coordinated collective action among neurons, or animals, to the dynamics of information exchange in human societies. Using an integrated experimental and theoretical approach Dr. Couzin will address how, and why, animals exhibit highly-coordinated collective behavior, and what this can teach us about information processing more generally. He will demonstrate new imaging and immersive virtual reality technology that allows us to reconstruct (automatically) the dynamic, time-varying sensory networks by which social influence propagates in groups. This allows us to identify, for any instant in time, the most socially-influential individuals, and to predict the magnitude of complex behavioral cascades within groups before they actually occur. By investigating the coupling between spatial and information dynamics in groups he and his team reveal that emergent problem solving is the predominant mechanism by which mobile groups sense, and respond to complex environmental gradients. Dr. Couzin will also reveal the critical role uninformed, or unbiased, individuals play in effecting fast and democratic consensus decision-making in collectives, and will validate these predictions with experiments involving schooling fish and wild baboons. These results are shown to transcend specific systems, and may give new insights into how individual brains come to decisions, a hypothesis he will propose, and explore (preliminarily), with ongoing experiments of individual decision- making in immersive virtual environments.

Iain Couzin is Director of the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Department of Collective Behaviour, and the Chair of Biodiversity and Collective Behaviour at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Previously he was a Full Professor at Princeton University, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and prior to that a Royal Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, and a Junior Research Fellow in the Sciences at Balliol College, Oxford. His work aims to reveal the fundamental principles that underlie evolved collective behavior, and consequently his research includes the study of a wide range of biological systems, from cells, to insect swarms, fish schools and primate groups. In recognition of his research he has been recipient of the Searle Scholar Award in 2008, top 5 most cited papers of the decade in animal behavior research 1999-2010, the Mohammed Dahleh Award in 2009, Popular Science’s "Brilliant 10” Award in 2010, National Geographic Emerging Explorer Award in 2012 and the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2013.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Claire Everett (Bendesky Lab). For general inquiries please contact [email protected].

The Columbia Neuroscience Seminar series is a collaborative effort of Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, the Department of Neuroscience, the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and the Columbia Translational Neuroscience Initiative, and with support from the Kavli Institute for Brain Science.