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SUMMARY:Thinking the right thoughts - Nathaniel Daw (Princeton University)
DTSTART:20220302T163000Z
DTEND:20220302T180000Z
UID:TALK171029@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Psychology Reception
DESCRIPTION:Bio:\nNathaniel Daw is Huo Professor in Theoretical and Comput
 ational Neuroscience in the Princeton Neuroscience Institute and the Depar
 tment of Psychology. at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in com
 puter science from Carnegie Mellon University and at the Center for the Ne
 ural Basis of Cognition\, before conducting postdoctoral research at the G
 atsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL. He served on the faculty at 
 New York University before coming to Princeton. His research concerns comp
 utational approaches to reinforcement learning and decision making\, and p
 articularly the application of computational models in the laboratory\, to
  the design of experiments and the analysis of behavioral and neural data.
 \n\nAbstract:\nIn many learning and decision scenarios\, especially sequen
 tial tasks like mazes\, it is easy to state an objective function for opti
 mal choice\, but difficult to actually compute it: for instance because th
 is can require enumerating many possible future trajectories. This motivat
 es a variety of simpler but less accurate approximations believed to be us
 ed as shortcuts by the brain\, which then\, in turn\, raise questions abou
 t when a resource-efficient agent should invest in evaluating candidate ac
 tions more carefully. Previous work has used a simple all-or-nothing versi
 on of this reasoning as a framework to explain many phenomena of automatic
 ity\, habits\, and compulsion in humans and animals: a rational cost-benef
 it account for why and when we exhibit habits and slips of action.\n \nHer
 e\, I present a more finegrained theoretical analysis of deliberation\, wh
 ich attempts to address not just whether to deliberate vs. act\, but which
  of many possible actions and trajectories to consider. Empirically\, I fi
 rst motivate and compare this account to nonlocal representations of spati
 al trajectories in the rodent place cell system\, which are thought to be 
 involved in planning. I also consider its implications\, in healthy humans
 \, for subjective feelings of boredom and cognitive fatigue\, and as a pot
 ential substrate for dysfunction such as worry\, rumination\, and craving.
  Finally\, I present results from a new study using magnetoencephalography
  in humans to measure subjective consideration of possible trajectories du
 ring a sequential learning task\, and study its relationship to rational p
 rioritization and to choice behavior. \n
LOCATION:Zoom meeting
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