Keynote Speakers

Prof. Benjamin Hayden

Professor of Neurosurgery, Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University

Title: Neural basis of prey-pursuit behavior

Abstract: Foraging is economic choice in the naturalistic domain. However, unlike in most laboratory economic choice tasks, naturalistic goal-directed foraging behavior typically requires continuous actions directed at dynamically changing goals. In that context, the closest analogue of choice is a strategic reweighting of multiple goal-specific control policies in response to shifting environmental pressures. Moreover, the trivially simple process of identifying options and associating them with their expectations becomes a difficult tracking problem. Understanding how these processes work is crucial for extending neuroeconomics to the real. We examined behavior and brain activity in humans performing a continuous prey-pursuit task. Using a newly developed control-theoretic decomposition of behavior, we find pursuit strategies are well described by a meta-controller dictating a mixture of lower-level controllers, each linked to specific pursuit goals. Examining hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) population dynamics during goal switches revealed distinct roles for the two regions in parameterizing continuous controller mixing and meta-control. Hippocampal ensemble dynamics encoded the controller blending dynamics, suggesting it implements a mixing of goal-specific control policies. In contrast, ACC ensemble activity exhibited value-dependent ramping activity before goal switches, linking it to a meta-control process that accumulates evidence for switching goals. Our results suggest that hippocampus and ACC play complementary roles corresponding to a generalizable mixture controller and meta-controller that dictates value dependent changes in controller mixing. Moreover, we find that people use separate, semi-orthogonal hippocampal maps for tracking distinct prey. The semi-orthogonality of these maps is crucial because it provides a representational scheme that allows for both functional differentiating different items but allows for simultaneous cross-item generalization. Ultimately, these results provide a core neurocomputational foundation for dynamic interactive choice in a simple context, one that can in the future be extended to ever more complex contexts.  

Biography: Benjamin Hayden is a Professor of Neurosurgery at Baylor College of Medicine. He got his Ph.D. at Uc Berkeley where he studied the neural basis of working memory and choice with Jack Gallant.  He did a post-doctoral fellowship at Duke University with Michael Platt where he began to focus on reward, choice, and executive control. His has consistently been interested in naturalistic behavior, especially foraging behavior. This interest has included studies of neural mechanisms underlying patch-leaving and diet selection, on freely moving behavior, and the psychology of foraging decision-making. In all of his work, he has focused on prefrontal structures, especially the anterior cingulate cortex, and on understanding the kinds of cognitive processes that are dysregulated in depression, anxiety, and addiction. 

Title: Cognition and decision making in wild foraging hummingbirds

Abstract: To follow

Biography: I began my career at the University of Otago, New Zealand with a joint degree in Zoology and Physiology.  A DPhil at Oxford, with John Krebs, on brain and behaviour in food storing birds was followed by a Junior Research Fellowship, at St John’s College, Oxford.  I then began to move north.  First to a lectureship in the Department of Psychology at the University of Newcastle, then to a readership in the Institute for Cell, Animal and Population Biology, University of Edinburgh, before reaching St Andrews in 2009, a joint position in Biology and Psychology.  I became a Professor in Biology in 2017 and in 2021 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  Since my DPhil I have combined behaviour, cognition, and neurobiology together in a Tinbergian framework to address questions in animal cognition in the laboratory and (minus the neurobiology) in the field.  My primary questions have concerned in spatial learning, memory and the hippocampus in various bird and mammal species, and the adaptive evolution of the brain, with my interests now (not entirely) focussed on understanding how birds know what nest to build.   I also address questions of cognition in wild hummingbirds in the Rockies with collaborators Andy Hurly (University of Lethbridge, Canada) and Maria Tello Ramos (University of Hull, UK).  My nest building work is done with zebra finches in the laboratory with collaborator Simone Meddle (University of Edinburgh, UK), blue tits in St Andrews, Scotland, and white-browed sparrow weavers in the Kalahari Desert, northern South Africa with Maria Tello Ramos. 

Dr. Miriam Klein-Flugge

Associate Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford

Title: Background reward rate and effort shape behavioural and neural signatures of learning and decision-making in human foraging

Abstract: In everyday life, agents typically encounter choice options sequentially. To make appropriate choices, they need to compare new options against the average value of alternative options (background reward rate) and consider costs, such as the effort associated with foraging. We designed a novel patch-leaving task in which human participants steered an agent over multiple patches of unknown depleting value, receiving probabilistic binary outcomes. The value of the foreground was not explicitly signalled and had to be inferred. We manipulated the overall environmental richness via the distribution of patch values (rich/poor). In addition, we systematically varied the effort associated with foraging, requiring participants to invest variable numbers of button presses to forage and obtain an outcome. This design allowed us to study the influence of background reward rate and effort on learning and foraging choices.

Biography: Miriam Klein-Flügge is an Associate Professor, Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale and UKRI-ERC fellow at the Departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry and the Oxford Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging at the University of Oxford. Her research group studies human cognitive processes, with a particular focus on motivation and decision making. She has extensive experience with neuroimaging and neuromodulation approaches. Her long-term vision is to conduct fundamental research that provides a platform for translation to psychiatric disease.