Dear Colleague,
On Friday, January 30th, the McGill Psychology Department will host Dr. David Redish, who will deliver the Hebb Lecture which may be of interest to members of your department. I would be grateful if you could circulate this notice on your department's email list or any relevant listserve.
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Dear All,
Our first Hebb Lecture of 2015 will be delivered by Dr. David Redish which will take place on Friday, January 30th, 2015 at 3:30pm in S1/3 Stewart Biology Building (1205 Dr. Penfield Avenue).
Dr. Redish is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He combines methods of animal behaviour, computational modelling and electrophysiology to understand the neurobiology of decision-making in rats. His recent work has attracted much interest because he is able to show, through neural recordings, when the animal is deliberating his choice, and then regrets the choice he has made. His work is placed in the context of mental time travel and it shows how even rats, like humans, can *see into the future.*
In addition to his main lecture at 3:30pm, Dr. Redish will give an informal morning seminar in which he will lead a discussion on multiple decision-making systems. The morning seminar will take place at 10:30am in room N7/14, Stewart Biology Building. Graduate students are especially encouraged to attend.
Main Lecture at 3:30pm, S1/3 Stewart Biology The Cognitive Rat: Looking forward and looking back
Abstract (see also: http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/misc/hebb/hebblectures.html ) A key component of cognition is the ability to use imagined and counter-factual events to guide decision-making. I will show how applying neural decoding calculation operations to neural ensembles recorded during behavior can identify moments of imagined and counter-factual events and differentiate those events from noise. The timing and information content of these non-local representations provides evidence for specific algorithmic operations during decision-making. I will describe several examples of cognitive, non-local operations during behavioral decision-making processes, including both spatial and non-spatial examples.
After the main lecture, there will be a Wine and Cheese on the 8th floor Lobby of the Psychology Dept (Stewart Biology Building).
Hope to see you there, Yogita
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Yogita Chudasama Ph. D Associate Professor McGill University Department of Psychology Laboratory of Brain and Behaviour 1205 Dr. Penfield Avenue Montreal, Quebec, HA3 1B1 Tel: 514 398-3419 Fax: 514 398-4896 Web: chudasamalab.mcgill.cahttp://chudasamalab.mcgill.ca ______________________________