Columbia University in the City of New York

Sep 17, 20194:00 pm
Seminar

Dynamics of Prefrontal Computations Underlying Decision-making

Featuring Joni Wallis, PhD, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California at Berkeley

September 17th, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)

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.

A major challenge to understanding the neural mechanisms underlying cognitive processes is that these processes cannot be directly observed, but rather must be inferred from behavioral measures. Furthermore, there could be considerable variability in these processes from one iteration to the next. Because neuronal responses are inherently stochastic, studies of cognitive processes typically average activity across many repeated trials. However, when the dynamics of those processes vary, this approach can obscure critical mechanistic details. In the first part of my talk, I will describe recent studies in my lab which have uncovered the dynamics of decision-making in orbitofrontal cortex with single trial resolution by leveraging the power of decoding ensemble activity by recording from many orbitofrontal neurons simultaneously. During individual choices, neural representations alternate between states associated with each available option, as if the network were considering them in turn. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss our attempts to modify these dynamics using electrical microstimulation to examine whether we can alter decision-making. If successful, this would be a first step to building a brain implant that might be able to modify maladaptive behaviors underlying neuropsychiatric disorders such as addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Dr. Joni Wallis is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Psychology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. Her research focuses on understanding the functional organization of the frontal lobe at the single neuron level. Her lab records the electrical activity from multiple individual neurons throughout the frontal cortex and determines the information encoded by those neurons. She previously identified the first neurons in the brain to encode high-level, abstract rules. Her current projects focus on developing brain-machine interfaces for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disorders that involve impaired decision-making including addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder and schizophrenia.

Dr. Wallis received a PhD in Anatomy from the University of Cambridge, and did her postdoctoral work in the lab of Dr. Earl Miller at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Those who wish to meet the speaker during their visit should contact Jennifer Bussel (Axel 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.

Venue: the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)
3227 Broadway, New York, NY 10027

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