Policy compression: the quest for simplicity in action selection Sam Gershman, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! The brain has evolved to produce a diversity of behaviors under stringent computational resource constraints. Given this limited capacity, how do biological agents balance […]

Carolyn Parkinson, an Associate Professor of Psychology at UCLA will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! Title and Abstract coming soon.

Neural circuits underlying learned motor sequence execution Bence P.  Ölveczky, a Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! Abstract: Our ability to sequence movements and actions in response to unpredictable environmental events underlies our rich and adaptive behavioral repertoire. Such flexible behaviors contrast […]

Richly structured reward predictions in dopaminergic learning circuits Angela Langdon from the National Institute of Mental Health will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! Theories from reinforcement learning have been highly influential for interpreting neural activity in the biological circuits critical for animal and human learning. Central among […]

Cognitive tools for uncovering useful abstractions Judith Fan, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford, will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! In the 17th century, the Cartesian coordinate system was groundbreaking. It exposed the unity between algebra and geometry, accelerating the development of the math that took […]

Combinatorial Creatures: Cortical plasticity within and across lifetimes. Leah Krubitzer, Professor of Psychology at UC-Davis, a will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! The neocortex is one of the most distinctive structures of the mammalian brain, yet also one of the most varied in terms of both size and […]

Elizabeth Spelke, a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! Title and Abstract coming soon.

Seeing social interactions Our very own Leyla Isik will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! Humans see the world in rich social detail. We effortlessly recognize not only objects and people in our environment, but also social interactions between people. The ability to perceive and understand others’ interactions […]

Engineering Human-Level Machine Theory of Mind Our very own Tianmin Shu will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! Abstract: Despite our tremendous progress in AI, current AI systems, including large language models (LLMs), still cannot adequately understand humans and flexibly interact with humans in real-world settings. One of the key […]

Dimensions of visual representation Our very own Mick Bonner will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! A central challenge in studying the brain is that its computations are carried out in high dimensions—they rely on the coordinated interplay of immense populations of neurons. To make sense of high-dimensional […]

Jennifer Groh, a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! Title and Abstract coming soon.

Perceptual Categorization and Perceptual Concepts Our very own E.J. Green will be giving a Colloquium talk at 3:30 pm with a Q+A to follow! The idea that there is a distinction between perceiving and thinking is built into our commonsense conception of the mind, presupposed by longstanding philosophical debates, and enshrined in psychology textbooks. But […]