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SUMMARY:From Computation to Large-scale Neural Circuitry in Belief - Tobia
 s Donner (University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf)
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20221122T130000Z
DTEND;VALUE=DATE-TIME:20221122T140000Z
UID:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/c1f7c6a0-750c-4a97-91d7-ac0c810b3ae1/
DESCRIPTION:Many decisions under uncertainty entail dynamic belief updatin
 g: multiple pieces of evidence informing about the state of the environmen
 t are accumulated to choose an appropriate action. Traditionally\, this pr
 ocess has been conceptualised as a linear and perfect (i.e. without loss) 
 integration of sensory information along purely feedforward sensory-motor 
 pathways. Yet\, natural environments can undergo hidden changes\, which re
 quires an adaptive\, non-linear accumulation of decision evidence that str
 ikes a tradeoff between stability and flexibility. How this adaptive compu
 tation is implemented in the brain has remained unknown.\n\nI will present
  an approach that my laboratory has developed to identify evidence accumul
 ation signatures in human behaviour and neural population activity (measur
 ed with magnetoencephalography\, MEG)\, across a large number of well-defi
 ned cortical areas. Applying this approach to data recorded during visual 
 evidence accumulation tasks with change-points\, we find that behaviour an
 d neural activity in frontal and parietal regions involved in action selec
 tion exhibit hallmarks signatures of adaptive evidence accumulation. The s
 ame signatures of adaptive behaviour and neural activity emerge naturally 
 from simulations of a detailed model of a recurrent cortical microcircuit.
  The MEG data further show that decision dynamics in downstream action-sel
 ective areas are mirrored by a selective modulation of the state of early 
 visual cortex. This state modulation (i) is expressed in the alpha frequen
 cy-band\, (ii) tracks the evolving belief state encoded in downstream area
 s\, (iii) adapts to the environmental volatility\, and (iv) is amplified b
 y pupil-linked arousal elicited by inferred change points. Our findings li
 nk normative decision computations to recurrent cortical circuit dynamics 
 and highlight the adaptive nature of decision-related feedback processing 
 in the brain.\nSpeakers:\nTobias Donner (University Medical Center Hamburg
 -Eppendorf)
LOCATION:New Radcliffe House (2nd Floor Seminar Room)\, Walton Street OX2 
 6NW
TZID:Europe/London
URL:https://talks.ox.ac.uk/talks/id/c1f7c6a0-750c-4a97-91d7-ac0c810b3ae1/
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DESCRIPTION:Talk:From Computation to Large-scale Neural Circuitry in Belie
 f - Tobias Donner (University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf)
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