Conference Speakers

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. 

Prof. Susan Healy

Professor & Director of Centre for Biological Diversity, School of Biology, University of St. Andrews

Dr. Miriam Klein Flugge

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

Invited Speakers:

Dr. David Barack

Dr. Aaron M. Bornstein

Dr. Dario Campagner

Prof. Becket Ebitz

Dr. Nicholas Furl

Senior Lecturer of Psychology, Royal Holloway University of London

Dr. Hannah Haberkern

Emmy Noether Group Leader, University of Würzburg

Prof. Mark Humphries

Prof. Elli Leadbeater

Dr. Jennifer Li

Prof. Dean Mobbs

Dr. Jacquie Scholl