Urgent decision making as a lens into the neural bases of behavior

Host

Alfonso Renart, PhD, Circuit Dynamics & Computation Lab

Venue

Seminar Room

Abstract

Behavior results from the continuous interaction between perceptual, cognitive, and motor systems, but their specific contributions to performance are often difficult to dissociate. Perceptually guided choices made under severe time pressure offer a highly effective way to approach this problem, as they neutralize the speed-accuracy tradeoff and lead to a psychophysical metric that is uniquely revealing of perceptual/cognitive capacity. Several insights based on this technique will be discussed, including (1) that perception is extremely fast, such that tens of milliseconds make a huge difference in real-world performance, and (2) that stimulus-driven, goal-driven, and history-driven forms of attention control interact dynamically in most visually guided choices.  These findings provide a general mechanistic framework for understanding how perceptual information modulates motor planning neural activity during visually guided behaviors.

Bio

Emilio Salinas grew up in Mexico City. He obtained a BSc degree in Physics there, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He obtained his PhD from Brandeis University in 1996, under the supervision of Larry Abbott. He then returned to Mexico as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Ranulfo Romo. In 1999 he went to the laboratory of Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute, for another postdoctoral stay. Emilio Salinas is currently a Professor in the Department of Translational Neuroscience at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. His research interests include constructing model neural circuits that are able to switch tasks in a context-dependent way, understanding the optimality of cortical sensory representations, and elucidating how the variance of single brain cells relates to the observed variability in performance of an individual. Most recently, his work has focused on how single oculomotor neurons contribute to the choice of where to look next in the context of urgent decision-making tasks, which offer a highly polished lens through which to investigate perception and cognition.

Register here.

About CR Colloquia Series

Champalimaud Research (CR) Colloquia Series is a seminar programme organised by the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown to promote the discussion about the most interesting and significant questions in neuroscience and physiology & cancer with appointed speakers by the CR Community.