Lecture series Freiburg "Towards a high-definition study of brains and behavior – technology, theory, and preliminary results" by Isreal Nelken

in the framework of the NEUROSCIENCE & NEUROTECHNOLOGY LECTURE SERIES

Israel NELKEN - ELSC Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Israel 

Brain activity varies at fast, sub-seconds time scales: perception as well as motor planning and execution may occur at rates of 10/s. In contrast, behavior in many neuroscientific studies employ temporally-coarse measures, often limited just to the success or failure in a trial. This discrepancy limits the explanatory power of neural accounts of behavior.

To bridge this gap, we develop theoretical and experimental tools for a ‘high-definition’ description of behavior – the sequence of decisions that animals take at a high temporal resolution (currently at about 10 Hz, but ideally at ~100 Hz). To keep a high level of experimental control, the setup implements Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), whose theory is well understood. Rats do not follow the optimal policies, and I will describe how we define the complexity of behavior from first principles, estimate it from data, and relate it to the concomitant neural activity.

Jan 20, 2021
from 12:15 PM to 01:15 PM

Zoom meeting

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