On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
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In realistic choice tasks, especially sequential ones like mazes, actions are separated from their consequences by many steps of space and time. A central computational problem in decision making — which arises in various guises such as credit assignment and planning — is spanning these gaps to work out the long-term consequences of candidate actions. I review recent experimental and theoretical work aimed at understanding the mechanisms by which the brain solves this problem. First, I review a new study that monitors neural signatures of reward expectancy in rodents to monitor how the brain propagates information about individual experiences with outcomes to distal choicepoints. Second, I report ongoing theoretical work that aims to clarify how the brain can judiciously manage and select among such computations so as to achieve effective decisions while minimizing computational costs. This offers a formal, resource-rational perspective on a range of issues such as habits and slips of action in the healthy brain, but also may explain dysfunctions such as compulsion, rumination, and avoidance.
To join the talk on the day
us06web.zoom.us/j/83721999727?pwd=cWYwaUZMdFRQa3JpdkVpaXE0SFNhdz09
Meeting ID: 837 2199 9727
Passcode: 248659
