Timothy Behrens, Ph.D.
Professor of Computational Neuroscience
Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences
Oxford University
Abstraction and inference in the hippocampal-frontal circuitry
Abstract
The cellular representations and computations that allow rodents to navigate in space have been described with beautiful precision. In this talk, I will show that some of these same computations can be found in humans doing tasks that appear very different from spatial navigation. I will describe some theory that allows us to think about spatial and non-spatial problems in the same framework, and I will try to use this theory to give a new perspective on the beautiful spatial computations that inspired it. The overall goal of this work is to find a framework where we can talk about complicated non-spatial inference problems with the same precision that is only currently available in space.
About the Speaker
Timothy E.J. Behrens is a British neuroscientist. He is Deputy Director of the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and Honorary Lecturer, Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience, University College London. In 2020, he won the UK Life Sciences Blavatnik Award for Young Scientists, having been a finalist for this award in 2018 and 2019. He has an M.Eng. and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford.