Ji Hyun Bak, Ph.D.
April 7(Thu) - April 7(Thu), 2022
12PM
Online zoom (ID: 728-142-6028)
Neuro@noon Seminar
Date: 12:00 PM, Thursday, April 7th
Speaker: Ji Hyun Bak, Ph.D.
(Univ. of California, San Francisco)
Title: Inferring internal and external sources of dynamics underlying decision-making behavior
Abstract: How does the brain produce cognitive behavior such as decision making? We are in an exciting time in neuroscience where this question can be asked directly in terms of data. Powered with technical developments, it is becoming increasingly possible to access the behavioral and neural activity of an animal while it is performing a carefully designed task. I will present how we use statistical approaches to make sense of the extremely rich data and to generate neuroscientific insights. Specifically in this talk, I will highlight how inferring the internal dynamics, in addition to the input from the external world, is both a key and a challenge in understanding cognitive behavior from data. I will illustrate this in two different problems: extracting the dynamics of animal behavior during learning in a sensory decision-making task, and inferring the dynamics from simultaneously recorded neural activity during a spatial memory-based decision-making task.