Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences

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.