Flexible reprogramming of sensory cortex: Why listening matters in the brain

Animals adapt their behaviour in response to variable changes in reward reinforcement. Value-based decision-making involves multiple cognitive maps across distributed brain areas. It is less clear which brain regions are essential and how changes in neural responses flexibly re-maps guiding adaptive behaviour. In this talk, I will highlight behavioural-neural interactions between frontal and sensory circuits that implement flexible decision-making. I will present further evidence of how some of these functions are disrupted in autism spectrum disorders, arguing for a new conceptual framework based on computational psychiatry to understand cognitive pathophysiology in neurological disorders.