Columbia University in the City of New York

Oct 12, 20183:30 pm
Seminar

Zuckerman Institute Postdoctoral Seminar: October

Featuring Karen Schroeder, PhD, (Churchland lab) and Daniel Kimmel, PhD (Shohamy lab)

October 12th, 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center (9th floor lecture hall)

This seminar will begin at 4:00 pm at the Jerome L. Greene Science Center on Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus (L7-119). Light refreshments will be available starting at 3:30 pm.

 

This month's speakers:

Karen Schroeder (Churchland lab): "Virtual Navigation Via a Closed-Loop Brain-Machine Interface"

To address the significant clinical need for high-performance locomotor neuroprosthetics (e.g., wheelchair control), we are developing new techniques to decode the necessary signals from rhythmic cortical activity. We exploit a behavioral task in which monkeys cycle a hand-help pedal forward or backward to advance along a virtual track and pause on targets to collect a juice reward. We built and tested a decoder that estimates the state of the neural population in task-relevant subspaces, the velocity of which was used to successfully control the direction and speed of virtual motion.

Daniel Kimmel (Shohamy lab): "Learning Abstract Rules from Concrete Experiences"

Human intelligence affords the ability to learn an abstract rule from concrete experiences, and then generalize this rule to novel instances so as to infer outcomes without trial and error learning. However, little is known about how the brain discovers abstract structure and how rules are represented and generalized. We measured BOLD signals while human subjects performed a novel inference task in which a hidden rule allowed subjects to infer correct responses and increase monetary gain. We observed wide variation in subjects’ ability to detect and apply the hidden rule. I will discuss the neural representation of abstract rules, how various representational architectures may facilitate generalization, and how these architectures may vary across brain regions and individuals.

 

This seminar is part of the Zuckerman Institute Postdoctoral Seminar series. For questions about this or future seminars, please contact series organizers Chris Rodgers, PhD, or Amy Norovich, PhD.

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

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