Neuronal Mechanisms Of Hidden State Inference
I'm a PhD candidate in the Wallis Lab at UC Berkeley, where I run behavioral experiments, build computational models, and record neural activity to study how we learn and make decisions. My current project focuses on how we learn to make sense of the world around us, and how our brains enable us to flexibly update our expectations when the world changes.
Change, as they say, is the only constant in life. And when change inevitably comes, we (thankfully) don't usually need to relearn everything from scratch. Instead, we can update our existing beliefs and quickly adapt our behavior to align with the current ways of the universe. Recent research points to a couple brain regions that might play an especially important role here: the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus.
My working hypothesis is that these regions work together to build a mental model of the world (i.e., a cognitive map*) , and use that model to plan future actions. To study this process, I'm recording electrical activity from orbitofrontal and hippocampus while rhesus macaques perform a probabilistic reversal learning task: if they learn the world works one way, then everything unexpectedly flips, how do their brains (and behavior) adapt?
* Tim Behrens and colleagues describe cognitive maps better than I ever could in their 2018 Neuron perspective.
* Tim Behrens and colleagues describe cognitive maps better than I ever could in their 2018 Neuron perspective.
