ABOUT THE SEMINAR

Mechanisms of adaptive decision-making

My talk will describe how we are building on foundational studies of the neural mechanisms of decision-making to understand how those mechanisms support cognitive flexibility. First, I will describe a general theoretical framework for optimal decision-making in dynamic environments, which includes traditional accumulate-to-bound models as a special case but more generally prescribes adaptive processes to interpret, accumulate, and use evidence to form effective decisions. Second, I will describe new findings showing that the primate brain follows many of these adaptive principles to form decisions. Third, I will relate these adaptive decisions to Occam’s Razor, including showing evidence that human decisions include a “simplicity bias” that reflects not just parsimony but also normative principles needed to respond flexibly to real environmental changes while limiting sensitivity to noise.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Joshua Gold, Ph.D., Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania

Joshua Gold is a neuroscientist whose training included studying mechanisms of learning as an undergraduate (with Mark Bear at Brown) and graduate student (with Eric Knudsen at Stanford) and mechanisms of decision-making as a post-doctoral fellow (with Mike Shadlen at the University of Washington). He currently is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, where he combines his training experiences into studies of how learning and decision-making interact in the primate brain. He also is Chair of the Neuroscience Graduate Group, Co-Director of the Computational Neuroscience Initiative, and a senior editor at eLife.

ABOUT THE BME SEMINAR SERIES

The Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University is proud to host an annual weekly seminar series on the latest developments and research in Biomedical Engineering. The weekly series takes place on Friday mornings at 11:00 AM Eastern and includes a variety of renowned academics from top universities to talk about their specific research and experience. This is a hybrid event.