Vivek Jayaraman, PHD

Senior Group Leader & Head of Mechanistic Cognitive Neuroscience

Janelia Research Campus Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Structural priors for flexible goal-directed navigation

Relatively unstructured artificial networks can be trained over millions of trials to perform specific flexible behaviors, but it is notable that many animals adapt their behavior to changing cues, contexts and goals with barely any experience. I will use a combination of behavioral, physiological and connectomic evidence from the fly, Drosophila melanogaster, to highlight how the modularity and structure of its neural networks may enable the animal to quickly generate and modify internal representations to achieve rapid flexibility in navigation.

Host Information: Minnu Sun [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.