Dr. Adam Kepecs Seminar

Neurobiology and Behavior Seminar

Tuesday, September 24th, 2019

11 AM, Dale Melbourne Herklotz Conference Center, Center for Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (Building 506 on the campus map)

 

Adam Kepecs, PhD

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

 

Neurobiology of confidence:  neurons, statistics, and psychiatry

 

Abstract: Confidence helps to optimize both routine decisions and momentous ones, yet manifests itself to us as a simple feeling. The inherently subjective nature of confidence has limited investigations by neurobiologists. I will describe an approach that lets us translate psychological questions about subjective confidence into the language of neuroscience. This approach uses a statistical framework for confidence that guides the design of behavioral tasks in rodents and humans and enables quantitative comparison of their behaviors, linking subjective with objective notions of confidence. Then I will describe our results on how rat orbitofrontal cortex mediates confidence-based algorithms to guide behavior. Finally I will discuss how we use computational behavioral phenotyping of confidence to link the neural circuitry underlying maladaptive behavior in rodents to psychopathology in humans.