Come check out our multiple posters at the Bernstein Conference, taking place Sept 29 - Oct 2 in Frankfurt, and the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting (SfN), taking place Oct 5-9 in Chicago!

Bernstein Conference

October 1, 12:45 - 14:15, poster session III, board 15

Albert Chen will present his work on The role of feedback in dynamic inference for spatial navigation under uncertainty: “Many animals compute their spatial position by integrating their running velocity. Is it also useful for animals to compute their velocity from their spatial positions? We compared an optimal inference algorithm with a heuristic algorithm for tracking position and velocity to understand the role that feedback from position to velocity plays during navigation.”

October 1, 14:15 - 15:45, poster session IV, board 20

Zach Cohen will present Revisiting efficient representations of space in multiscale place field populations: “Place cells, which putatively encode spatial position, exhibit heterogeneously sized and overlapping receptive fields. When investigating the computational role of this heterogeneity, we found that it offers only a marginal (if any) increase in the quality of encoded spatial information in comparison to a homogeneously tuned population. Our work thus demonstrates that construing place cells as solely implementing a positional code fails to predict their measured multiscale tuning, suggesting that the computational role of their tuning heterogeneity has yet to be identified.”

Society for Neuroscience annual meeting (SfN)

October 7, 1 - 5pm, poster PSTR251.09 / W33

Zaki Ajabi will present A causal inference perspective on learning in the head direction system: “We used principles of causal inference to ask how the head direction (HD) system could detect changes of external context during environmental exploration. Disambiguating whether a changed perception of the environment was due to noise or actual sensory context changes, our approach allowed us to normatively explain how the HD system ought to arbitrate between relearning and maintaining associations between HDs and sensory input (i.e. vision). Our model provides testable predictions of the behavioral effects on the speed of relearning in the HD system, in changing environments.”

October 8, 8am - 12pm, poster PSTR281.27 / F4

Brooks Musangu will present work with John Vastola, Valentina Vencato, Jean-Paul Noel, Gregory C DeAngelis, and Dora E Angelaki on Eye movements as a window into the mind’s strategy for tracking moving targets: “We explored how eye movements can reveal the beliefs of humans navigating towards potentially moving targets in dynamic environments. We found that, rather than tracking the navigation endpoint where they expect to intercept the targets, humans closely tracked the target’s estimated location up to interception. Our work thus offers new insights into how eye movements can uncover hidden belief dynamics during decision-making in uncertain conditions.”

October 8, 8am - 12pm, poster PSTR314.10 / Z10

Albert Chen will present his work on The role of feedback in dynamic inference for spatial navigation under uncertainty. Please see above for a brief summary.