Marcelo Mattar

Marcelo Mattar

New York University

“Modeling human planning and hippocampal replay with an RNN that thinks”

NYU Department of Economics
19 W 4th Street, Room 517

Abstract

When interacting with complex environments, humans can rapidly adapt their behavior in response to changes in task or context. To facilitate this adaptation, people often spend substantial periods of time contemplating possible futures before acting. In this talk, I will present empirical and modeling work exploring the critical balance between thinking and acting, and the factors affecting the content of our thoughts when we are making a decision. I will describe a neural network model that learns to plan when planning is beneficial. This model explains variations in human thinking times and accounts for neural activity recorded from the rodent hippocampus during navigation tasks. This work integrates neuroscience, psychology, and computational modeling to shed light on the neural basis of flexible decision-making.

Speaker Bio 

Dr Marcelo Mattar is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. He holds a BA in Electronics Engineering from the Aeronautics Institute of Technology in Brazil, a MA in Statistics from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He previously worked as a postdoc at Princeton University advised by Nathaniel Daw and held fellowships at the Institute of Neurology-Imaging Neuroscience, UCL and Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge. Marcelo Mattar’s group studies the neural computations underlying memory and decision-making. His lab studies how the brain supports flexible decision-making through a combination of computational modeling, behavioral experiments, and neural recordings. His research focuses on the interplay between learning, memory, and planning, aiming to understand how the brain learns internal models from experience and how it simulates future scenarios to guide decision-making.