Interdisciplinary Neuroscience: Seminars/Events

Interdisciplinary Neuroscience and Biomechanics and Movement Science Graduate Programs Seminar

April 8, noon
STAR North Atrium

Chris Fetsch
Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute
Johns Hopkins University

“Neural dynamics of sensorimotor confidence and confidence-dependent learning”

Decisions are associated with a degree of confidence, an internal prediction of accuracy that helps guide learning from feedback and constructing behavioral sequences. I will introduce how we investigate this in nonhuman primates using tasks that invite the monkey to ‘bet’ on the outcome of a perceptual judgment, either of visual motion or visual-vestibular self-motion. In the visual task, we found that monkeys can process a single stream of evidence to update both dimensions of the decision (choice and confidence) simultaneously and that population dynamics in visual and parietal cortices reflect the requisite parallel process. The results suggest that a form of ‘embodied metacognition’ emerges during decision formation, in part to facilitate adjustments of decision policy, which we find are also reflected in parietal activity.

Chris Fetsch is an assistant professor of neuroscience and the Robert G. Merrick Research Chair at the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He received his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis in 2009 and postdoctoral training at the University of Washington and Columbia University in New York. His lab investigates the neural basis of visual and vestibular perception, decision confidence and navigational decision-making in nonhuman primates, using high-density neural recording and VR/flight simulator technology.

A light lunch will be provided following the seminar. Please RSVP below.

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