Join the Carney Institute for Brain Science for a Career Conversation with Sam Reiter, Ph.D., as he shares his personal academic journey and career trajectory. The event will be followed by a discussion and Q&A session, moderated by Kristin Webster, the Carney Institute’s Associate Director for Training and Development.

Dr. Reiter will also be presenting a Center for the Neurobiology of Cells and Circuits Special Seminar discussing the Cephalopod skin patterns as windows into brain dynamics on April 26 at 12:00 p.m. in the Carney Innovation Zone. 

Sam Reiter is currently an assistant professor and leader of the Computational Neuroethology Unit at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. His background is in experimental neuroscience, where he has studied diverse topics in a range of model organisms. After studying neuroscience at Brown University as an undergraduate, he continued graduate school in neuroscience at Brown and the US National Institutes of Health and trained as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.

Please RSVP by April 24 and reach out to [email protected] with any questions.

Location: Dome Room and Zoom (https://brown.zoom.us/j/95166664847)

Speaker: Linda Zou, University of Maryland

Title: Two Axes of Racial Subordination

Abstract: The United States’ racial and ethnic landscape continues to undergo transformative shifts, with post-1960s immigration playing a large role. The expanded presence of Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and other racial and ethnic minority groups has underscored the need to better incorporate these groups’ experiences into social psychological scholarship and research. In this talk, I will first provide support for a two-dimensional Racial Position Model that goes beyond the traditional racial hierarchy to explore how the two axes of perceived inferiority and cultural foreignness together shape racial and ethnic minority groups’ distinct experiences in the U.S. Next, I will present recent findings exploring the implications of groups’ two-dimensional racial positioning for building intra-minority solidarity across different racial and ethnic minority groups.

Join The Carney Institute for Brain Science as we host The Center for the Neurobiology of Cells and Circuits Special Seminar with Sam Reiter, Ph.D., where he will discuss the Cephalopod skin patterns as windows into brain dynamics.

Dr. Reiter is currently an assistant professor and leader of the computational neuroethology unit at Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. His background is in experimental neuroscience, where he has studied diverse topics in a range of model organisms. After studying neuroscience at Brown University, he continued graduate school in neuroscience at Brown and the US. National Institutes of Health, and most recently worked as a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.

Speaker: Mary Hegarty (UCSB)

Title: Individual Differences in Navigation

Abstract: In this talk, I will review evidence for large individual differences in human navigation ability, or what is commonly referred to as the “sense of direction”. I will review how we study individual differences in navigation in both real and virtual environments, and what we know so far about the variation in navigation abilities and strategies. Finally I will review some current directions of research on this topic, including questions of how we should measure individual differences in navigation and research on how GPS use might be affecting our navigation abilities.

The Neural Mechanisms and Circuits for Flexible Decision-Making

NaYoung So
Colombia University

A hallmark of cognition lies in the ability to process and combine information in a flexible manner. To identify the mechanisms and circuits underlying this computation, I study the neurobiology of decision-making. Humans and other primates predominantly use vision to gather information, and therefore, I use nonhuman primates as a model for studying the neural correlates of decisions communicated by eye movements. I designed novel tasks that deconstruct the decision process to understand (i) how the decision can be paused and resumed after interruptions and (ii) how the decision can be terminated to be reported later. While the monkey was engaged in these tasks, I recorded tens to hundreds of neurons simultaneously from the parietal cortex. When a decision is interrupted by intervening eye movements and needs to be updated, I demonstrated the population of parietal neurons represents the decision continuously without interruption—by transferring decision-related activity from neuron to neuron across intervening eye movements.
Furthermore, I showed that if the termination of a decision is separate from the expression of the decision, different groups of parietal neurons represent the When and What of the decision. Yet, these representations are correlated on single trials, suggesting the When and What of a decision remain coupled via a single evidence accumulation process. Together, my results reveal the building blocks of the decision process and how these units are put together to guide flexible behavior. Based on my findings, I hypothesize that behavioral flexibility can be explained by the many ways neurons can communicate within and across brain areas to cater to various task demands. My future research will test this hypothesis by probing hundreds of neurons simultaneously from the parietal and frontal areas while the monkey makes decisions under varying task demands:
1. Different information types (i.e., value and sensory).
2. Different rules or contexts.
3. Different ways to gather information.
My research benefits from the latest innovation in neurotechnology for probing neural populations and the set of sophisticated analyses and models to identify neural mechanisms and circuits for decision-making. Through this approach, my research aims to uncover the general principles governing cognition.

Opposing Roles of VTA Co-Transmitters in Reward and Aversion

Shelley Warlow
University of California, San Diego

The ventral tegmental area (VTA) controls motivation most notably through its dense dopaminergic projections to various limbic and forebrain sites. However, the VTA is heterogeneous and some VTA neurons have the surprising capacity to co-release multiple neurotransmitters when activated. For example, a subset of VTA glutamate neurons co-release dopamine in the nucleus accumbens medial shell (NAc), and a separate subset co-release GABA in sites such as lateral habenula (LHb) and ventral pallidum. Optogenetic stimulation of VTA glutamate projections promotes positive reinforcement in mice in some assays, yet in other assays can promote aversion, making it difficult to reconcile how the same neurons can promote opposing motivations. Here, I present findings from experiments that dissect the distinct contribution that individual co-transmitters from VTA glutamate neurons make to reinforcement and avoidance behaviors. Overall, our results suggest that distinct neurotransmitters co-released from VTA contribute to motivation in an opposing manner, and highlight mesolimbic contributions to reinforcement that are dopamine-independent.

ShiNung Ching,Associate Professor Electrical & Systems Engineering,
Washington University in St. Louis

A fundamental challenge in computational neuroscience has been the translation of multimodal data into formal mathematical and computational models that can reveal biophysical mechanisms in neural circuits and their connection to behavior. In this presentation, I will describe our recent efforts in this domain, focusing on extracting from data the generative dynamics that give rise to overt observations of brain activity. Specifically, I will describe how we have adapted tools from Bayesian filtering and algorithmic optimization toward the problem of parametrically learning high-dimensional, biophysically interpretable models of network interactions involving hundreds to thousands of neural populations. These techniques place a particular emphasis on model-building at the level of individuals, which in turn provides leverage on revealing idiosyncrasies in brain mechanisms. In this regard, I will highlight two ways in which we are leveraging the obtained models. First, I will discuss our newly developed methods to directly interrogate the intrinsic dynamics within models, toward assessing topological similarity across individual (brain) dynamics and the functional salience thereof. Second, I will describe how we are using models to predict input-output relationships within brain networks and their responses to exogenous, causal perturbations. In addition to basic mechanistic insights, these approaches enable us to design brain stimulation protocols that are tailored to individuals and defined in terms of dynamical targets that can be linked to specific functional endpoints; to conclude I will briefly describe ongoing work to validate this latter premise.

Speaker: Vivienne Chi, Brown University

Title: Human-Robot Trust during Interactive Teaching

Abstract: Building and maintaining trust is critically important for continued human-robot interaction and the prospect of robots learning social skills from social environments. While prior work explored ways for artificial agents to learn norms from human users, a psychological analysis of the human teacher has been largely overlooked. To gain insight into how humans would teach robots to master social and moral norms and update their trust, I will present a novel paradigm in which participants interactively teach a simulated robot to behave appropriately in a healthcare setting. In this talk, I will show that human teachers are highly responsive to the robot’s local and cumulative performance. I will discuss my efforts to measure trust dynamics as teaching and learning progress and to examine how human teachers’ choice of teaching method and their perceived contribution to the robot’s learning play a role in these trust dynamics.

Speaker: Stefan Uddenberg (University of Chicago)
Title: Hyper-realistic reverse correlation reveals a novel gender bias in representations of leadership across political orientation

Abstract: Appearance influences election outcomes via leadership stereotypes – past work has shown that adults and even children can predict real-world elections solely on the basis of perceived competence judgments via photographs with relatively high accuracy. What are our visual stereotypes of leadership? And how do they differ according to political orientation? Here we explored this question using a novel reverse correlation technique powered by hyper-realistic generative face models (Albohn et al., 2022). Participants (N=300) viewed generated faces one at a time and judged whether they looked like a “good leader”, a “bad leader”, or “not sure”. Applying a simple algorithm to the aggregated choices yielded visually compelling and interpretable mental representations at both individual and group levels. While political group-averaged representations were similar along many subjective attributes (e.g., perceived “trustworthiness”, “attractiveness”; Peterson et al., 2022), they revealed a novel gender bias: right-leaning participants’ “good leaders” were more masculine than those of left-leaning participants. We directly replicated this result using richer latent face representations (N=300). We then validated individual participant models on new observers (N=150), probing their willingness to vote for different faces generated by past participants in an imaginary election. As predicted, participants were not only more willing to vote for “good” leader faces, but were most willing for faces generated by participants sharing their political orientation. Taken together, our results demonstrate how political orientation is linked to a novel gender bias in leadership representations, showcasing the utility of our reverse correlation technique.

Unraveling Experience-Dependent Cortical Plasticity That Sculpts Taste Perception: From Synapses to Ensembles

Chi-Hong Wu
Brandeis University

Sensory experiences shape our perception of the world by altering cortical synaptic functions, resulting in the adaptation of subsequent related behaviors. Yet, the precise mechanisms orchestrating experience-dependent modifications of cortical synapses remain incompletely understood. To address this gap, my research focuses on conditioned taste aversion – a robust associative learning paradigm known to alter rodents’ taste perception following adverse experiences. Specifically, I seek to identify the synaptic plasticity mechanism pivotal for regulating the specificity and generalization of associative taste memory.

Using ex vivo physiology and activity-dependent genetic labeling methods, I uncovered that homeostatic synaptic scaling plays a crucial role in constraining postsynaptic weights in excitatory neurons within the gustatory cortex during memory consolidation. I demonstrated that this homeostatic regulation via
synaptic scaling is key to ensuring the specificity of associative taste memory. Intriguingly, I found that sensory experiences associated with strongly negative consequences can override synaptic scaling, resulting in pervasive increases in postsynaptic strengths within the cortical network and the generalization of learned taste aversion. Collectively, my work unveiled a novel mechanism whereby
homeostatic synaptic scaling shapes the specificity of associative taste memory while laying the groundwork for elucidating the synaptic underpinnings of memory overgeneralization in mental disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

In an ongoing work, I also established a two-photon in vivo calcium imaging method to longitudinally track taste-evoked activities in cortical neurons. This novel approach will further propel me to delineate how synaptic scaling—and other forms of synaptic plasticity—guides the transition in neuronal representations of taste in the gustatory cortex during taste learning.

In the future, I plan to elucidate how the interplay between cortical excitatory and inhibitory synaptic
plasticity modifies the functions of taste circuitry and shapes familiar taste perception. I will then examine the mechanism by which cortical inhibitory drives gate the interaction between current and future taste experiences. By leveraging interdisciplinary strategies from cellular and behavioral neuroscience, my
research will advance our understanding of how synaptic computation at the cellular level systematically instructs taste coding in the cortex, ultimately providing insight into how such neural adaptability fails in animal models of psychiatric disorders.

Speaker: Matthew Gingo, Wheaton College
Title: Moral Resistance and Social Opposition in the Family: Children’s Evaluations of Legitimate Norms and Lies

Abstract: When children and their parents disagree, it is often the parents who have the final say. It is not the case, however, that children have no recourse against parental control or prohibitions when negotiations fail. One of the ways that children exercise their agency is by engaging in subtle but powerful forms of everyday resistance when they judge that parents have overstepped the legitimate bounds of their authority. This talk is focused on children’s use of covert defiance and deception as modes of resisting parental directives that restrict children’s desired actions. We will discuss the age-related and domain-specific reasoning that children bring to bear when assessing the legitimacy of parental prohibitions and children’s defiance and deception in several social-cognitive domains and what this tells us about social and moral development.

Multiregional Mechanisms of Cognitive Control

Agrita Dubey, Ph.D
University of Pennsylvania

Sensory distractions impede our ability to finish tasks and achieve our goals. The successful execution of goal-driven behavior depends on our ability to control the influence of distractors. The prefrontal cortex (PFC)- a brain region most advanced in primates- is central to cognitive control mechanisms. Investigating the neural mechanisms of cognitive control is crucial to our understanding of mental health disorders. In my talk, I will discuss our recent findings elucidating the role of PFC beta activity in mediating top-down control of sensory information. Drawing from my research, I will propose a conceptual framework that emphasizes a multiregional communication approach to uncover the cognitive control mechanisms. Additionally, I will discuss our efforts in utilizing state-of-the-art high-density neural recording techniques, enabling recording from multiple brain areas and providing new insights into neural mechanisms.

The Emergence of Symbolic Structure from Data in Prototype Neural Networks

Neural network models have grown in popularity to be the dominant artificial intelligence paradigm of our time, succeeding across a variety of challenging tasks despite largely receiving unstructured sequential input. Despite this broad success, it is a classically open question whether they can represent and generalize symbolic structure; in which there are entities which are represented as atomic symbols (CAT, MUFFIN), and there are abstract content-independent functions that operate over those symbols (e.g. NOT, AND, OR). In principle, neural networks are universal function approximators and can learn any function, but in practice, learning symbolic structure from data without the use of architecture specific to symbolic structure has proven challenging. However, modern neural models (e.g. large language models) are able to learn extremely powerful representations over the course of their training, which calls into question whether learning representations of symbolic structure is within their capacity.

In this thesis, we explore the hypothesis that representations of symbolic structure can emerge during training in prototypical neural sequence models. We evaluate LSTM- and Transformer-based neural network models with low inductive biases and without extensive architectural engineering on symbolic tasks borrowed from developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience. We focus on carefully controlled experimental paradigms and small models in order to yield interpretable results. In the first chapter, we evaluate whether neural network language models can differentiate logical operators in a symbolic reasoning task within a propositional logic setting, and find that models’ performance relies on the degree to which the operators are separable given their distribution in the data. In the second chapter, we evaluate object-tracking models from computational vision at a task from the developmental psychology literature which tests reasoning by exclusion within a visual setting, and find that models do not generalize to the logical inference when it is not explicitly featured in their training data. Finally, within a computational cognitive neuroscience setting, we find that Transformer models trained on a working memory task mimic biological functionality for storing and recalling items within working memory, despite not having an explicit “memory” component themselves. Overall, our results provide insight into the conditions within the training data and architecture of neural models which are necessary for representations of symbolic structure to arise, which can inform evaluation of neural models across the field of artificial intelligence.

Host: Professor Ellie Pavlick

Neural and Molecular Pain Processing in the Spinal Cord and Brain of Awake, Behaving Animals

Biafra Ahanonu, Ph.D
University of California, San Francisco

Pain is a complex, multidimensional percept that initiates appropriate protective behaviors by integrating sensory information from the spinal cord with ongoing brain states. Yet, many questions remain about spinal sensorimotor transformations, in part because most “pain processing” spinal cord studies used anesthetized or semi-intact preparations. I will discuss our methodological innovations that enabled longitudinal in vivospinal cord imaging in behaving and freely moving animals for months to over a year. We monitored individual axons, identified a spinal somatotopic map, simultaneously imaged stimulus-provoked dynamics of projection neurons on both sides of the spinal cord in behaving animals, and observed months-long microglial changes after nerve injury (https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.05.22.541477). Our studies underscore the significance of recording spinal cord activity in the behaving animal.

In parallel, to understand molecular changes that occur in chronic pain states and identify novel therapeutic targets, we created post-injury proteomes at each node in the pain neuroaxis—the sensory ganglia, spinal cord, and brain. I will discuss how our recent findings and new techniques integrate with our prior pain-related brain imaging studies (e.g. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aap8586) and computational pipelines (e.g. CIAtah, https://git.io/ciatah), that together define a theoretical and experimental framework to understand pain-related sensorimotor transformations and may identify novel pain-relief strategies.

Speaker: Johannes Burge (University of Pennsylvania
Title: Perceptual consequences of processing dynamics in human vision

Abstract: I will discuss recent results demonstrating striking perceptual consequences when different visual features and different visual locations are processed with millisecond-scale differences in timing. Certain image differences between the eyes cause dramatic misperceptions of where in 3D space a target is and in what 3D direction it is moving; and these effects are modulated by where in the visual field a target is located. I will explain the temporal processing and stereo-geometry underlying these misperceptions. The fact that substantial perceptual errors are caused by millisecond differences in processing speed highlights the exquisite temporal calibration required for accurate perceptual estimation. The fact that these misperceptions are rare in natural viewing indicates how well the visual system is calibrated in normal circumstances. Ongoing and future work on a range of related topics with clinical and scientific import will be discussed.

Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Grand Rounds
Teen stress, trauma, and transition: Considering biology and social context
Nicole R. Nugent, PhD
Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
Brown University
Wednesday, April 10 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/2023-2024-Child-Adolescent
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to identify and become familiar with the following concepts:
• Describe how stressful and traumatic life experiences may impact teen mental health
• Characterize the role of social environmental, including digital interactions (i.e., text messaging, social media communication, etc.), for adolescents during times of transition and stress
• Consider the ways that experiences may impact adolescent biology

Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Nugent has no financial relationships to disclose.

Speaker: Jae-Young Son, Brown University

Title:

Abstract:

Elisa Donati, Ph.D.

The emergence of neuromorphic electronic circuits has the potential to revolutionize the field of bioelectronic medicine, enabling the development of highly accurate and targeted solutions for treating chronic diseases. By mimicking the structure and function of the nervous system, neuromorphic circuits can effectively interface with real neural processing systems, paving the way for real-time closed-loop interactions with biological tissues. This talk will delve into the key characteristics of neuromorphic circuits that make them ideal for interfacing with the nervous system. It will also showcase the design and implementation of closed-loop hybrid artificial and biological neural processing systems, demonstrating their potential in various healthcare applications. ​

Elisa Donati received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees (cum laude) in biomedical engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, and the Ph.D. degree in Biorobotics from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy. She is currently a Research Fellow with the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zürich and ETH Zürich, Group Leader at ZNZ Center of Neuroscience in Zurich, and Dozentin, D-ITET, ETHZ. She was also an affiliated researcher in the iCub facility at the Italian Institute of Technology, Italy. Her research activities include the interface of neuroscience and neuromorphic engineering for building innovative human-machine interactions. She is interested in building bioinspired hardware, based on neural coding, to develop innovative solutions for wearable always-on devices. Elisa is also involved in the Technical Committee of IEEE Transaction on Biomedical Engineering and Neural Network and AI Technical. She is also the editor of IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

Human-guided Robot Object Search

Object search is a central problem for human-robot interaction, as finding, localizing, and then grasping an object is a first step for almost anything a person would want the robot to do in the physical world. Additionally, natural language and gesture are the two most popular communication modalities due to the familiarity and comfort they afford the majority of human users. Human-guided object search is a difficult problem as the robot must identify objects based on the natural language and gesture specifications, which might lack information and be ambiguous. Furthermore, object detection accuracy can suffer from sensor noise and the robot’s partial observation of the environment.

This thesis integrates language-conditioned visual models with a model-based decision-theoretic framework to enable effective robotic object search with complex natural language and gesture specifications. I will first present our research on affordance-based object retrieval which learns to encode language and visual inputs into a joint embedding space. Next, I will discuss our work on incorporating the language-conditioned visual detector’s uncertainty into the planner’s observation model for improved state estimation and object search. Lastly, I will describe our project on utilizing pointing gesture information in robot object search and my future research directions.

Host: Professor Stefanie Tellex

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Is your lab developing the next great innovation to solve an unmet need? Are you curious about how to create a start-up? Brown Technology Innovations, Advance RI-CTR and the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship present Faculty Entrepreneur Connect, a new group designed to allow faculty inventors to meet and network with other entrepreneurially-minded faculty at Brown. If you have started a company, are thinking about starting a company, or just want to learn about entrepreneurship at Brown, we encourage you to attend!

Friday, April 5, 2024, 9:30AM

Jules Blyth, Senior Director in Brown’s Office of Research Integrity and Kieran Rock, Compliance Analyst for Brown’s Conflict of Interest Program present: “Managing Conflict of Interest with Startups”

Are you thinking about starting a company based on your research? Have you heard confusing or conflicting rumors about all of the things you “cannot” do with a startup because of conflict of interest? Jules Blyth and Kieran Rock from Brown’s Office of Research Integrity will lay out conflict of interest considerations for faculty who are thinking of starting a company, and provide examples of how Brown faculty have appropriately managed conflict of interest while still pursuing their startup interests.

Subcortical Organization of the Somatosensory System

Anda Chirila, Ph.D.
Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

While the encoding of touch is extensively investigated in the somatosensory cortex, how tactile stimuli are represented atfirstsynapse in the somatosensory pathway, in the spinal cord dorsal horn, is largely unexplored. To fill this gap, I developed a preparation for large-scale in vivo spinal cord electrophysiology, in combination with well-controlled mechanical stimuli, computational analyses and a range of genetic manipulations. This approach revealed six principal dorsal horn
response profiles to light touch stimuli, reflecting extensive convergence and nonlinear transformation of signals from both low-threshold and high-threshold mechanoreceptor subtypes. Genetically defined dorsal horn interneuron populations map onto distinct functional profiles, and genetic manipulations of select interneuron subtypes revealed a highly interconnected dorsal horn
network architecture, with individual dorsal horn interneurons exerting broad influence over all other subtypes. In addition, we found that dorsal horn interneuron subtypes flexibly shape a range of postsynaptic dorsal column (PSDC) projection neuron signals to the somatosensory cortex. In fact, PSDC output neurons exhibit highly heterogeneous responses to tactile stimuli, and this functional diversity virtually collapses in the absence of distinct dorsal horn inhibitory circuit motifs. Finally, cortical responses to light touch, as well somatosensory behaviors are impaired in the absence of diverse dorsal horn output streams. Thus, extensive mechanoreceptor subtype convergence and nonlinear transformations at the first stage in the somatosensory hierarchy shape how touch of the skin is represented in the brain. Future directions include exploring how sensory processing in the spinal cord and its flexible, modifiable ascending signaling streams are altered in disorders associated with dysfunctions of the somatosensory system, such as autism spectrum disorders and neuropathic pain.

Abstract: Proper regulation of gene expression is a crucial component of life, yet remains poorly understood despite a recent explosion in the quality and availability of genomic measurements. A paradigm that has emerged involves training neural networks that take in genomic sequences and predict these measurements directly. Far from being uninterpretable, these models can be paired with feature attribution algorithms to discover building blocks of the regulatory code. In this talk, I will introduce our ongoing work on a neural network called DragoNNFruit that extends this paradigm to modern data sets where measurements are available for each of many individual cells. A distinguishing feature of DragoNNFruit is that the parameters of this method are dynamically generated for each cell in the experiment based on properties of the cell, rephrasing the learning task as that of learning how to process genomic sequence in a cell-specific manner. When applied to data from cells that are slowly transitioning across types, DragoNNFruit uncovers the regulatory code of both endpoints but also how this code gets rewritten as cells alter their identity, and even how individual nucleotides can be involved in different regulatory programs in different cell types. Afterwards, I will briefly discuss pitfalls that one can encounter when applying machine learning to genomics data, and introduce my vision for new directions that these machine learning models can take.

Bio: Dr. Jacob Schreiber is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Genetics at Stanford University, where he develops machine learning-based methods for studying the genome. Previously, he did his Ph.D. at the University of Washington. In parallel to his research, he has contributed to the Python open-source ecosystem as a core developer for scikit-learn and the author of pomegranate, a package for probabilistic modeling, apricot, a package for submodular optimization, and ledidi, a method for designing biological sequence edits that exhibit desired characteristics, among others.

Title: Hanging in the balance: homeostasis in hibernation

 Speaker: Dr. Ni Feng  Assistant Professor, Biology Department
Program in Neuroscience and Behavior
Wesleyan University

Title: Cognitive Control under Reward and Penalty: Mechanisms Underlying Variability within and across Individuals

All are encouraged to attend!

Speaker: Dr. Junyi Chu, MIT
Title: The puzzle and promise of play

Abstract: Few phenomena in childhood are as compelling or mystifying as play. While many animals play, human play is distinguished by the sheer diversity of goals that we pursue, even as adults. Yet the seeming inutility of play belies one of the hallmarks of intelligence: a remarkably flexible ability to reason and plan in novel situations. What kind of mind generates and pursues so many goals, and has so much fun in the process? I suggest that answering this question takes us beyond current accounts of rational action and exploration. In this talk, I will present three lines of work on reasoning and decision-making in (mostly) playful contexts. I will begin with a case study of goal-directed reasoning: how children assess speculative conjectures in the absence of any evidence. Then, I will discuss the proposal that play in humans reflects a novel kind of exploration, in which players are trying to figure out what problems they can pose and solve. I will present a number of empirical studies – spanning exploratory play to rule-based games and imaginative pretense – illustrating how children and adults choose goals and actions when trying to have fun, compared with under other objectives. This research suggests that inventing and pursuing novel goals is an intrinsically rewarding activity, and I will speculate on why that might be valuable for human cognition. I will end by briefly discussing ongoing research on goal generation and creativity, in both humans and machines. By paying attention to the goals we adopt and the problems we make for ourselves, I aim to explain the richness and flexibility of the human mind.

The Office of University Postdoctoral Affairs (OUPA) at Brown University is pleased to announce the second annual postdoctoral research symposium on Monday, March 25, 2024 in the Salomon Center and Sayles Hall. This symposium will feature the innovative research being conducted by postdoctoral scholars at Brown and include the following:

• A keynote address from Randall Ribaudo, Co-founder of SciPhD.com, and research presentations from the recipients of the 2024 Postdoctoral Excellence Awards, followed by an awards ceremony in the Salomon Center from 1:30 pm to 3:45 pm. 
• A poster session accompanied by a reception with appetizers as well as alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages in Sayles Hall from 4:00 pm to 5:30 pm.

Details, including information about the keynote address, instructions for how to participate in the poster session, and the event schedule, are available on the official symposium website.

Please note, only individuals with a current appointment at Brown University as a postdoctoral research associate, postdoctoral fellow, or an equivalent postdoctoral appointment at a Brown-affiliated hospital may present their research during the poster session in Sayles Hall. However, all members of the Brown community are welcome to attend the programming in the Salomon Center and poster session in Sayles Hall to network and learn about the research being conducted by postdocs at Brown.

Learn more about the symposium at the official website here.

2024 Brown University Postdoctoral Research Symposium keynote speaker, Randall Ribaudo, Ph.D.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Social & Cognitive Science Brown Bag Seminar Series

Friday, March 22nd, 2024

2 p.m. - 3:30 p.m., Dome Room (Metcalf 305)

Speaker: Hannah Snyder, Brandeis University

Title: Cognitive risk mechanisms for depression and anxiety in adolescence and emerging adulthood

Abstract: Adolescence and emerging adulthood is a key risk period for depression and anxiety, potentially in part because still-developing executive function is not adequate to fully cope with new roles and demands, increasing stress. I will discuss two lines of research which seek to better understand these risk factors. The first tests a risk pathway linking poor executive function to psychopathology via stress generation and repetitive negative thinking. The second further probes links between stress and psychopathology risk, focusing on the role of stressor controllability appraisals. Finally, I’ll briefly highlight our ongoing research (a) testing how risk factors interact to predict depression and anxiety symptom trajectories during the transition to college, and (b) testing a classroom intervention aimed at reducing academic stress.

If you are interested in having lunch with Dr. Snyder and/or meeting with her one-on-one, please sign up here: https://shorturl.at/yCFT9

Abstract: Healthcare faces numerous ongoing challenges with substantial disparities in access to care and health outcomes, while an aging population and increased prevalence of chronic conditions place further strain on healthcare systems. Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize medicine and transform healthcare delivery. However, several diverse challenges are impeding routine and widespread adoption. In this talk, I will outline these challenges and present recent advances in machine learning that can help overcome them. First, I will present an automated machine learning approach that addresses technical challenges in developing, understanding, and deploying ML systems that currently render them largely inaccessible for medical practitioners. I will describe applications of this methodology to develop powerful prognostic models in cancer and cardiovascular disease that can inform clinical decision-making. Second, I will explore how machine learning can drive scientific discovery with advances in feature selection, explainable AI, and causal reasoning. Finally, I will explain how these approaches form part of a broader vision for machine learning in healthcare.

Speaker: Wayne Mackey (Statespace/Aimlabs)

Title: Entrepreneurship and Science in the Wild

Abstract:  How different is it, really, to do research in academia vs industry? Why would one choose one over the other? What if you want to commercialize your academic research? In this talk I will share experiences, challenges, and insights on my journey from industry to academia to entrepreneurship - and possibly back to academia again. I’ll discuss the good, the bad, and the ugly of founding my startup, Statespace, at the intersection of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and video games. I’ll introduce our video game platform (Aimlabs) that acts both as our core product and our primary research tool, as well as how we are opening it up to researchers at scale to more easily allow academic researchers to conduct engaging experiments “in the wild”.

Deconstructing human reinforcement learning

Anne Collins, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley

Reinforcement learning frameworks have contributed tremendously to our better understanding of learning processes in brain and behavior. However, this remarkable success obscures the reality of multiple underlying processes that support humans’ unique flexibility and adaptability. In this talk, I will show that not accounting for such underlying processes in computational cognitive modeling weakens the generalizability and interpretability of findings, with important consequences in neuroscience, developmental, clinical research. I will present multiple approaches to disentangle the multiple processes that support flexible learning, including episodic and working memory processes. This works highlights the importance of studying learning as a multi-dimensional phenomenon that relies on multiple separable but inter-dependent computational mechanisms. Insights from how the brain implements learning is essential to informing generalizable, interpretable cognitive modeling. 

Building Performant and Brain-Like Recurrent Models from Neurons and Astrocytes

Leo Kozachkov, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Associate, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT

The brain’s ability to perform challenging tasks is facilitated by its many inductive biases—hardwired biological features that predispose it to process information in certain ways over others. These features include anatomically distinct brain areas, as well as specialized cell types such as neurons and glia. Inductive biases grant the brain computational powers that currently surpass artificial intelligence systems in many domains. In this seminar, I will cover two recent avenues of research that leverage the brain’s inductive biases to build highly performant, recurrent artificial networks.

In the first half of my talk, I will discuss recent progress in understanding the computational role of different cell types. I will focus on neuron-glial interactions. An intriguing fact is that most human brain cells are not neurons, but rather glia. There is mounting experimental evidence suggesting that astrocytes, a specialized type of glial cell, play a significant role in learning, memory, and behavior. However, our theoretical understanding is lagging far behind. I will cover recent work that aims to bridge this gap by relating dynamical, energy-based neuron-astrocyte networks to powerful AI models such as Modern Hopfield Networks and transformers.

In the second half of my talk, I will discuss how and why the brain maintains a balance between flexibility and stability through “dynamic attractors”, which are reproducible patterns of neural activity in response to (potentially time-varying) stimuli. This work reveals an unexpected and useful theoretical link between dynamic attractors and modularity. Specifically, recurrent neural networks with dynamic attractors can be combined into large, modular “networks of networks”, reminiscent of the brain’s macroscopic organization, in ways that provably preserve stability. These higher-order, stable networks can then be optimized for state-of-the-art performance on benchmark sequential processing tasks, demonstrating that dynamic stability is a useful inductive bias for building brain-like performant recurrent models.

Speaker: Konrad Kording, University of Pennsylvania
Title: Causality in neuroscience: why we want it? How to get it?
Abstract: As scientists, we often ask how something works. What we usually mean with that is that we want to know how one aspect of the world (say, one neuron) affects another aspect of the world (say, another neuron). I will give an intuition of the relevant problems and approaches. Focusing on quasi-experimental approaches and machine learning, I will give an overview of how to broaden the scope of meaningful causal techniques in neuroscience and beyond.

Brown University’s Fluid Biomarkers Laboratory & Quanterix invite you to join us for a lunch and learn to take a look at:

Biomarker detection using the Ultra-sensitive Quanterix Simoa Technology

• Sensitivity and precision well beyond a standard ELISA
• Introduction to how the instrument works and what the workflow looks like
• Application across the multiple diseases; Neurology, Oncology & Inflammation
• Discover how this technology may be utilized for your research interests!

Lab tour to follow

Hybrid Option Available. RSVP Required

“Bridging scales in intelligent systems– from octopus skin to mouse brain”

Leenoy Meshulam Ph.D.

Swartz Theory Fellow, University of Washington

For an animal to perform any function, millions of neurons in its nervous system furiously interact with each other. Be it a simple computation or a complex behavior, all biological functions involve many individual units. A theory of function must specify how to bridge different levels of description at different scales. For example, to predict the weather, it is irrelevant to follow the velocities of every molecule of air. Instead, we use coarser quantities of aggregated motion of many molecules, e.g., pressure fields. Statistical physics provides us with a theoretical framework to specify principled methods to systematically ‘move’ between descriptions of microscale quantities (air molecules) to macroscale ones (pressure fields). Can we hypothesize equivalent frameworks in the nervous system? How can we use descriptions at the level of neurons and synapses to make precise predictions of activity and behavior? My research group will develop theory, modeling, and machine learning tools to discover generalizable forms of scale bridging across species and behavioral functions. In this talk, I will present lines of previous, ongoing, and proposed research that highlight the potential of this vision. I shall focus on two seemingly very different systems: mouse brain neural activity patterns, and octopus skin cells activity patterns. In the mouse, we reveal striking scaling behavior and hallmarks of a renormalization group- like fixed point governing the system. In the octopus, camouflage skin pattern activity is reliably confined to a (quasi-) defined dynamical space. Finally, I will touch upon the benefits of comparing across animals to extract principles of multiscale function in the nervous system, and propose future directions to investigate how macroscale properties, such as memory or camouflage, emerge from microscale level activity of individual cells. 

Mental Health of Children and Families in Humanitarian Settings 
Suzan Song, MD, MPH, PhD
Director, Global Child & Family Mental Health
Boston Children’s Hospital
Visiting Professor, Harvard Medical School
Professor of Psychiatry
George Washington University
Wednesday, March 13, 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/2023-2024-Child-Adolescent
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to identify and become familiar with the following concepts:
• Identify common mental health issues affecting children and families in humanitarian settings
• Describe multi-disciplinary responses to meeting the mental health needs of these youth
• Evaluate strategies and interventions for assessing and working with youth and families in humanitarian settings
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Song, reports the following financial relationships: Royalties: Penguin Random House

Speaker: Maddie Pelgrim, Brown University

Title:

Abstract:

“Successes and failures of machine learning models of sensory systems”

Jenelle Feather, Ph.D. 

Flatiron Research Fellow at the Center for Computational Neuroscience

The environment is full of rich sensory information. Our brain can parse this input, understand a scene, and learn from the resulting representations. The past decade has given rise to computational models that transform sensory inputs into representations useful for complex behaviors such as speech recognition or image classification. These models can improve our understanding of biological sensory systems and may provide a test bed for technology that aids sensory impairments, provided that model representations resemble those in the brain. In this talk, I will discuss my research program, which aims to develop methods to compare model representations with those of biological systems and to use insights from these methods to better understand perception and cognition. I will cover experiments in both the auditory and visual domains that bridge between neuroscience, cognitive science, and machine learning. By investigating the similarities and differences between computational model representations and those present in biological systems, we can use these insights to improve current computational models and better explain how our brain utilizes robust representations for perception and cognition. 

“The Relational Bottleneck and the Emergence of Cognitive Abstractions”

Taylor Webb, Ph.D.

Human cognition is characterized by a remarkable ability to transcend the specifics of limited experience to entertain highly general, abstract ideas. Efforts to explain this capacity have long fueled debates between proponents of symbol systems and statistical approaches. In this talk, I will present an approach that suggests a novel reconciliation to this long-standing debate, by exploiting an inductive bias that I term the relational bottleneck. This approach imbues neural networks with key properties of traditional symbol systems, thereby enabling the data-efficient acquisition of cognitive abstractions, without the need for pre-specified symbolic representations. I will also discuss studies of perceptual decision confidence that illustrate the need to ground cognitive theories in the statistics of real-world data, and present evidence for the presence of emergent reasoning capabilities in large-scale deep neural networks (albeit requiring far more training data than is developmentally plausible). Finally, I will discuss the relationship of the relational bottleneck to other inductive biases, such as object-centric visual processing, and consider the potential mechanisms through which this approach may be implemented in the human brain.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Perception & Action Seminar

Thursday, March 7, 2024

12 noon - 1 p.m., Dome Room (Metcalf 305)

Speaker: Nora Newcombe

Title: Mental Rotation: Development, Assessment and Real-World Relevance

Abstract: Humans manipulate objects physically, starting in early infancy, and they also perform such manipulations mentally. How do such abilities develop, why are there individual differences, can we assess variability, and what consequences does variability have? This talk will discuss these questions focusing on the best studied skill, mental rotation, and its consequences for mathematical and scientific reasoning.

Sleep Health Disparities in Children and Adolescents: A Way Forward
Judith Owens, MD, MPH
Boston Children’s Hospital
Professor of Neurology
Harvard Medical School;
Wednesday, March 6, 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-23-24
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:
• Describe the B-SATED model of pediatric sleep health
• List three sleep parameters and/or disorders impacted by sleep health disparities in children from socioeconomically disadvantaged and historically marginalized groups
• Give examples of a) a focus on education and awareness, b) a research goal, and c) a targeted public health policy with the potential to reduce sleep health disparities

Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Owens reports the following financial relationships: Consultant- ApniMed;
Data Safety Monitoring Board member- Idorsia Pharmaceuticals; and Scientific Advisory Board member -Sleep Number

Gabriel Kreiman, Ph.D.

Professor, Harvard University, Children’s Hospital Boston

What information do neurons along the ventral visual cortex represent? Exhaustively examining all possible images is empirically impossible. Therefore, to investigate stimulus preferences, investigators have used a combination of intuitions derived from previous studies, natural stimulus statistics, and serendipitous findings. Here I will describe an approach to uncover what neurons want using a real-time, unbiased, systematic algorithm based on computational models of the ventral visual cortex. We use a generative deep neural network as a vast and diverse hypothesis space. A genetic algorithm searches this space for stimuli guided by neuron preferences. We show that this approach can rapidly generate synthetic images that trigger high activations, both in model units as well as in real neurons, in many cases even higher activations than those elicited by large numbers of hand-picked natural stimuli or images derived from conventional approaches. This approach forces us to revisit how we think about neural coding in the ventral visual cortex. I will also show the results of psychophysics experiments where humans are asked to describe the images that trigger high activation patterns in inferior temporal cortex neurons, reinforcing the notion that neurons in the ventral visual cortex represent complex visual features but not semantic categories. Finally, I will show that similar conclusions can be drawn by scrutinizing the representations in artificial neural networks as coarse approximations to the processing steps along the ventral stream.

Jonathan Viventi, Associate Professor in Duke University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, will present a talk entitled, “Flexibile electronics for neural interfaces.”

Right now, all of the tools that interface with our brains face a fundamental trade-off. We can either sample with low resolution, over large areas of the brain, or we can sample with fine resolution, over very small areas of the brain. This doesn’t fit with the way our brains are structured. With over 12 million neurons in each square cm of brain surface, we need to sample with high resolution over large areas in order to understand the way the brain works. The limitation is wiring. Every contact we put in the brain requires an individual wire and we can’t fit more than about 100 wires inside our heads. Using the same electronics that enable a digital camera to have millions of pixels without millions of wires, we can move some of the signal processing right to the sensors, allowing us to overcome the wiring bottleneck. The challenge is that traditional electronics are rigid and brittle. They are not compatible with the soft, curved surfaces of the brain. The solution is to make electronics that are flexible. Think of a piece of 2x4 lumber and a sheet of paper, they’re both made out of the same material, but have dramatically different physical properties. Leveraging that idea, we can make electronics that are extremely flexible, by making them very thin. Using these flexible electronics, we have developed high-density electrode arrays with thousands of electrodes that do not require thousands of external wires.

This technology has enabled extremely flexible arrays of 1,024 electrodes and soon, thousands of multiplexed and amplified sensors spaced as closely as 25 µm apart, which are connected using just a few wires. These devices yield an unprecedented level of spatial and temporal micro-electrocorticographic (µECoG) resolution for recording and stimulating distributed neural networks. I will present the development of this technology and data from in vivo recordings. I will also discuss how we are translating this technology for human clinical use.

Speaker: Lena Luchkina, Harvard University
Title: Learning to talk about the absent, the abstract, and the unobservable

Abstract: How do we begin to learn about things we have never seen, such as people we have never met (‘Napoleon’), time that has not passed (‘tomorrow’), or ideas that have no stable perceptual form (’same’ vs. ‘different’ or ‘square root of negative one’)? To address this question, my research explores the development of a referential link between words and mental representations and the role of this link in shaping our ability to learn and reason about things we do not witness directly. I will first talk about my experimental investigations of young infants’ ability to create mental representations of something they have never seen and to connect such representations to words. I will then discuss learning mechanisms that enable this connection. Finally, I will talk about infants’ and young children’s ability to leverage this connection to make inferences about others’ knowledge based on language.

Speaker: Stefano Anzellotti, Boston College

Title: What drives the organization of social perception?

Abstract: The neural mechanisms that enable us to see faces, expressions, bodies and actions are organized into multiple distinct brain regions and subdivided into different processing streams. What drives this complex organization? Recent work has introduced unsupervised models driven by constraints at the level of the inputs, that successfully account for key aspects of the neural architecture of vision. However, other findings are difficult to reconcile with the view that the organization of social perception is exclusively driven by bottom-up constraints. As an alternative, constraints at the level of the outputs might play a central role. I will share the results from a series of studies that test predictions that derive from this alternative hypothesis, and discuss its potential to account for the architecture of social perception.

Please join us for a seminar with Larry F. Abbott, Ph.D.

William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience and Professor of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics (in Biological Sciences)

Principal Investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute

Co-director of Columbia’s Kavli Institute for Brain Science

Title: “Modeling the Navigational Circuitry of the Fly”

Abstract: Navigation requires orienting oneself relative to landmarks in the environment, evaluating relevant sensory data, remembering goals, and convert all this information into motor commands that direct locomotion. I will present models, highly constrained by connectomic, physiological and behavioral data, for how these functions are accomplished in the fly brain.

Speaker: Leyla Isik (Johns Hopkins University)
Title: The neural computations underlying human social interaction perception

Abstract: Humans perceive the world in rich social detail. We effortlessly recognize not only objects and people in our environment, but also social interactions between people. The ability to perceive and understand social interactions is critical for functioning in our social world, but despite its importance, the underlying neural computations remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will start by outlining a framework for studying social interaction perception as a computational vision problem. Then I will discuss new research using a largescale, naturalistic video dataset and condition-rich fMRI experiment to show that social interaction information is extracted hierarchically by the visual system, along the recently proposed lateral visual pathway. In the final part of my talk, I will discuss the computational implications of visual social interaction processing, and present a novel graph neural network model, SocialGNN, that instantiates these insights. SocialGNN reproduces human social interaction judgements in both controlled and natural videos using only visual information, without any explicit model of agents’ minds or the physical world, but requires relational, graph structure and processing to do so. Together, this work suggests that social interaction recognition is a core human ability that relies on specialized, structured visual representations.

February 16, 2024

ZOOM ONLY

Speaker:

Darius Ebrahimi-Fakhari, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor of Neurology

Director, Movement Disorders Program

Boston Children’s Hospital

Topic:

“Pediatric Movement Disorders – From Genes, to Circuits, to Clinical Care”

Objectives

• Recognize that movement disorders can be symptoms of common and rare disorders.
• Name treatable movement disorder that should never be missed.
• Recognize the first line agents for symptomatic treatment – their indication and side-effect profiles
• Review movement disorder emergencies and emerging therapies

Emotion dysregulation and mental health in autism 

Carla A. Mazefsky, PhD

Nancy J. Minshew Endowed Chair in Autism Research and

Professor of Psychiatry, Psychology, and Clinical and Translational Science,

University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

Wednesday, February 14, 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/2023-2024-Child-Adolescent

Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to identify and become familiar with the following concepts:

• Explain how emotion dysregulation can alter the course of autism spectrum disorder
• Become familiar with the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory as a tool for research and practice
• Identify key elements of a promising new intervention for emotion regulation for autistic teens and young adults called the Emotion Awareness and Skills Enhancement Program

Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Mazefsky, has no financial relationships to disclose.

Speaker: Emily Finn, Dartmouth College

Title:

Abstract:

Speaker: Kathryn Bonnen (Indiana University)

Title: Visuomotor control of walking in real-world environments

Abstract: Coordination between visual and motor processes is critical for the selection of stable footholds when walking in rough terrains. In our work we collect eye and body movement data while people walk over complex natural terrains The resulting integrated visuomotor dataset is valuable for interrogating how vision supports locomotion in real-world environments and observing the sensorimotor loop for vision and full-body movement. Here we focus on two aspects of these data: (i) Gaze strategies. Average gaze location was highly sensitive to the complexity of the terrain, with more fixations dedicated to foothold selection as the terrain became more difficult. Gaze sequences were stereotyped, following forward and backward in order along upcoming footholds. These findings suggest a predictive control strategy aimed at anticipating/adjusting to maintain gait efficiency while also finding good footholds. (ii) Binocular Vision. We found a relationship between the participant’s stereo acuity (a measure of binocular depth perception) and their gaze strategy. Furthermore, disrupting binocular vision led to a tendency to focus on closer footholds. These findings suggest that this loss of visual information places more pressure on the visuomotor control process.  

The Responsible Use and Measurement of Race in Medicine and Public Health

Lorraine T. Dean, ScD

Associate Professor of Epidemiology, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Wednesday, February 7, 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm

• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-23-24

Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:

• Explain the origins of race measurement in the US
• Review methods for collecting and analyzing data on race and racism
• Provide examples of how to be anti-racist in writing about race in scientific studies

Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Dean has no financial relationships to disclose.

Speaker: Samuel Murray, Providence College

Title: Imperative and aspiration: An empirical case for two kinds of moral norms

Abstract: Moral norms are usually considered imperative: we must never steal or murder. But not every moral norm is an imperative; some norms, such as reducing waste, are aspirational. Across five preregistered studies (N = 839), we identified differences between imperatival and aspirational moral norms. In Study 1, participants judged that complying with aspirational norms was more conditional on expected community compliance relative to imperatival norms, but less conditional than social norms, while compliance with social norms was more a matter of personal preference than compliance with aspirational norms. In Study 2, participants judged that violating imperatival and aspirational norms was both wrong and blameworthy, though people have a right to violate aspirational, but not imperatival, norms. In Study 3, participants judged that complying with aspirational norms was more praiseworthy than complying with imperatives, even though compliance with imperatival norms is considered equally right and socially desirable. In Study 4, participants judged aspirational norm violations to cause some degree of harm. In Study 5, we found that aspirational and imperatival norms differentially regulate intra- and interpersonal relationships. Complying with aspirational norms impacts self-image more positively than complying with imperatival norms. The opposite pattern is observed for violations. Likewise, compliance with the aspirational is better associated with dispositions to befriend, while violations of imperatival norms is better associated with dispositions to avoid. Our results suggest that aspirational norms play an important role in different cognitive processes related to moral judgment and stem from the way individual rights are represented in moral thinking.

Speaker: Zhenyu Zhu (CLPS)

Title: Toward a neural model of visually-guided locomotion
Abstract: Visually-guided locomotion is one of the most important ecological tasks for the survival of organisms. Understanding its neural mechanism could also potentially be helpful for the development of more robust and efficient assistive technologies such as self-driving cars. In my talk, I will first present experiments that delineate the influence of different motion information in humans’ locomotor control. With these experiments as benchmarks, I will discuss the ongoing work of building a deep-learning-based neural model to explain the human trajectories in these experiments. 

Eunsol Choi
Computer Science Department
University of Texas at Austin
Thursday, February 1, 2024 at Noon
Room 368 (CIT - 3rd floor)

Modern language models (LMs) store and use immense amounts of knowledge about the real world. However, their knowledge, acquired during pre-training on web corpora, can be incorrect, misleading or outdated. In this talk, I will discuss two complementary avenues for augmenting knowledge in LMs. First, I will present a modular, retrieval-based approach which provides new information in-context at inference time. We improve in-context retrieval augmentation by learning a compressor which summarizes retrieved documents into textual summaries, enabling adaptive and efficient augmentation. In the second half of the talk, I will present a parameter updating approach which aims to enable models to internalize new information. Our distillation-based approach outperforms existing approaches in propagating injected knowledge to enable broader inferences. Together, this talk outlines the challenges and progresses of knowledge augmentation for LMs.

Eunsol Choi is an assistant professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to UT, she spent a year at Google AI as a visiting researcher. She received a Ph.D. from University of Washington and B.A from Cornell University. Her research area spans natural language processing and machine learning. She is particularly interested in interpreting and reasoning about text in a dynamic real world context. She is a recipient of a Facebook research fellowship, Google faculty research award, Sony faculty award, and an outstanding paper award at EMNLP.

Host: Professor Ellie Pavlick

“Minimally invasive neuroelectronics”

Neuroengineering Special Seminar

Anqi Zhang, Ph.D.
Stanford University

Speaker: Irene Pepperberg, Boston University
Title: Science as a Self-Correcting Mechanism …. Examples from Avian Cognition
Abstract: I have examined the cognitive and communicative abilities of Grey parrots (Psittacus erithacus) for over 45 years. My students and I have trained these birds to use English speech to identify objects, attributes, the categorical labels for these attributes, and numerical sets; we then use this communication code to test them as one might test young children. My talk will focus on numerical concepts and inference by exclusion. I will use these studies to illustrate how ‘science is a self-correcting mechanism’, showing how the research in each of these areas evolved to examine more complex issues over time.

We invite faculty to join us for a conversation about mental health and graduate students in STEM featuring:

• Alycia Mosley Austin, Associate Dean of Diversity and Inclusion, Graduate School
• Corey Fitzgerald, Psychotherapist and Outreach Coordinator, Counseling and Psychological Services
• Logan Gin, Assistant Director for STEM, Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning

The goal of the session is to learn about the common mental health challenges reported by graduate students at Brown, review evidence-based best practices for mentors that promote mental health and support productivity in trainees in a lab environment, and identify institutional resources available to support faculty and graduate students.

The Organization of Neural Representations for Cognitive Control
David Badre, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair
Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences
Brown University
Wednesday, January 10, 2024◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-23-24
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:
• Introduce the topic of cognitive control as approached from a cognitive neuroscience perspective
• Introduce the concept of neural representational geometry as a crucial factor in cognitive control performance
• Present evidence from EEG and fMRI experiments in our lab that show how the brain organizes neural representations of tasks for effective controlled behavior
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Badre has no financial relationships to disclose.

Use of Electroconvulsive Therapy for the Treatment of Catatonia
Neera Ghziuddin, MD, MRCPsych (UK)
Professor, Department of Psychiatry
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Section
Director, Treatment Resistant Disorders and Pediatric ECT
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Wednesday, December 13, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/2023-2024-Child-Adolescent
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to identify and become familiar with the following concepts:
• Use of ECT
• Diagnosing and managing catatonia
• When and how to optimize the use of ECT
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Ghziuddin has no financial relationships to disclose

Please join us for visiting scholar, Takahisa Furukawa, MD PhD, Distinguised Professor from Osaka University, give a seminar on: 

“The molecular mechanisms of ciliopathy from the perspective of protein transport”

Hosted by Eric Morrow, MD PhD

Director, Center for Translational Neuroscience

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series
Co-sponsored by the Center for Computational Brain Science
Perception & Action Seminar

Speaker: Wilson S Geisler III, University of Texas at Austin
Title: Visual Search in Natural and Other Complex Backgrounds

Abstract: Visually searching for specific objects is a fundamental task that humans and other animals are performing almost continuously. Over the past 5-6 years we have been measuring and modeling the factors that determine human search performance in natural and other complex backgrounds. Our goal is to develop a general theory that can quantitatively predict visual search performance and guide studies of the underlying neural circuitry. We are taking a systematic three step approach. The first step is to measure and model the scene and sensory factors that determine the identifiability of specific targets at known locations across the visual field, in arbitrary scenes. The second step is to measure and model covert search where the specific target can appear at random locations within the visual scene with some prior probability distribution, and the observer’s task is to report the location of the target or that it is absent. In the covert search task, the stimulus is presented for the duration of a typical fixation during overt search. The third step is to measure and model overt search, which can be regarded as a sequence of covert searches where information is extracted and combined over the series of fixation locations selected by the observer. To obtain principled biologically plausible hypotheses for the decision processes in covert and overt search we have been using “Bayesian Heuristic Decision Analysis”, where we derive the Bayesian ideal searcher and use it as the benchmark for systematically evaluating heuristic decision processes. This talk will summarize our progress in this three-step approach, including a number of rather surprising discoveries.

Welcome to Equity in Implementation Science! Reflection from a Learner
Ana A. Baumann, PhD
Associate Professor of Surgery
Division of Public Health Sciences | Department of Surgery
Washington University School of Medicine
Wednesday, December 6, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-23-24
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:
• Identify what is NOT equity
• Define equity-centered implementation science
• Identify actions to center equity in implementation science

Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Baumann has no financial relationships to disclose.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Social Cognitive Science Seminar

Location: Zoom, https://brown.zoom.us/j/95166664847 

Speaker: Aaron Bornstein, Asst. Prof., UC Irvine
Title: Suboptimal or locally rational? Foraging as a window onto the mechanisms of decisions under uncertainty

Abstract: Humans and animals are often maligned as being bad (“suboptimal”) at making decisions, especially decisions under uncertainty. But is this allegation justified? In this talk, I will present recent findings in the domain of patch foraging. Foraging requires individuals to compare a local option to the distribution of alternatives across the environment. Foragers, across a range of species, have been observed to systematically deviate from exogenous notions of optimality by “overharvesting”—staying too long in a patch. I introduce a computational model that explains the appearance of overharvesting as a by-product of two mechanisms: 1) statistically rational learning about the distribution of alternatives and 2) planning that adapts to the uncertainty of these distributions - looking ahead farther when more sure about the options available. I test this model using a variant of a serial stay-leave task and find that human foragers’ behavior is consistent with both mechanisms. Our findings suggest that overharvesting, rather than reflecting a deviation from optimal decision-making, is instead a consequence of optimal learning and adaptation. I then present new theoretical work that builds on these findings to rationalize seemingly maladaptive decision behaviors, including those used to assess transdiagnostic clinical symptoms like anhedonia, explaining them as adaptive responses to unpredictability in the early-life environment. I close with preliminary experimental findings in support of the predictions of the new model.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Perception & Action Seminar

Speaker: Adrian Haith, Johns Hopkins University
Title: How Cognitive is Motor Skill Learning?

Abstract: 

Learning new motor skills is often assumed to be a highly cognitive process. In the context of simple learning tasks, like adapting to a visuomotor rotation, it is well established that cognitive processes play a key role in learning. I will argue, however, that the role of cognition may not be so central when learning more complex motor skills. We have studied a challenging motor learning task in which participants control an on-screen cursor using planar movements of both arms, through a very non-intuitive mapping. We find that people can easily perform this skill concurrently with a cognitively challenging dual task, even in the early stages of learning. Furthermore, we find that people are unable to exploit obvious task structure in order to accelerate learning. I will discuss the implications of these findings for how we should think about the role of cognition in motor skill learning.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Developmental Brown Bag (DBB) is a speaker series dedicated to investigating developmental origins, trajectories and mechanisms. Speakers consider development from a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective.

Speaker: Nicolò Cesana-Arlotti
Title: Foundations of logical thought in human infants

Abstract: Humans’ disposition for rational learning, planning, and decision-making is unparalleled in the natural world. Foundational views in the cognitive sciences hold that to learn, think and talk as we do, we rely upon a “language of thought” – a capacity to frame ideas in abstract logical structures and draw the inferences they support. Yet, we know little about the foundations of logical cognition in the ontogeny of the mind: are learning, education, or the mastery of language required for logical cognition? In this talk, I will present my attempt to answer this question. First, I discuss a developmental primitive of logical reasoning: infants make inferences by contrasting and eliminating alternatives. Through a series of studies, I will examine the nature of this preverbal logical capacity and its function in knowledge acquisition. Next, I will present newer work investigating the breadth of infants’ and children’s uncharted logical resources: (i) the presence of other fundamental logical representations, (ii) their abstractness and domain-generality, and (iii) the capacity to integrate distinct logical operations. My goal will be to share with you works that aim to shed light on the developmental foundations upon which thought is built and made possible.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Developmental Brown Bag (DBB) is a speaker series dedicated to investigating developmental origins, trajectories and mechanisms. Speakers consider development from a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective.

Speaker: Brian Leahy, Brown University
Title: Evidence that children appreciate possibilities emerges in parallel in language and behavior

Abstract: When we speak, words like ‘maybe’ and ‘might’ can be used to mark a sentence as merely possible, as one member of a range of competing alternatives for a single reality. These words allow us to coherently describe incompatible possibilities in a single, coherent sentence. It’s incoherent to say that Jim is in Paris and Jim in Rome, but there’s nothing incoherent about saying that Jim might be in Paris and might be in Rome. Cognition has elements that perform this function as well, flagging propositions as merely possible, enabling us to store information about multiple incompatible possibilities in a coherent model that supports effective action. I call any element that has this function a “possibility concept”. How do possibility concepts support reasoning and decision-making, and how do they develop? In this talk I will show curious lapses in preschoolers’ decision-making when they are faced with multiple incompatible possibilities. These lapses indicate that they are not deploying possibility concepts. Then I will show that these lapses are related to language comprehension. Many children have mastered parts of the English modal auxiliary system by 36 months of age. But mastering the full system takes much longer; many 4-year-olds still have not mastered the full system. But those 4-year-olds who have mastered the full system do not show these curious
lapses in their decision-making. Four-year-olds who have not yet mastered the auxiliary system show the same curious lapses as much younger children. These data prompt a challenging question: does learning to talk about possibilities play a role in the development of concepts for thinking about possibilities?

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Perception & Action Seminar

Speaker: Daniel Dilks, Emory University 
Title: Three scene systems: neural, causal, and developmental evidence

Abstract: The human ability to recognize a place (or “scene”) forms the bedrock for many of our essential everyday behaviors. In a brief glance, we extract a wealth of information from scenes, such as the category of the scene (e.g., a kitchen), and other critical properties such as what behavior is appropriate for the current context (e.g., cooking). At the same time, we extract information that is vital for navigation, allowing us to effortlessly find our way through the local environment without running into the kitchen walls or banging into the kitchen table, for example. What’s more, we can situate the local environment within a broader spatial map, allowing us, for instance, to know where our favorite restaurant is relative to our house. But how do we accomplish these remarkable feats? One promising strategy for attempting to understand human visual scene processing is to characterize the neural systems that accomplish it. Cognitive neuroscience of the past three decades has revealed a set of three cortical regions that together make up the human visual scene processing system: the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the occipital place area (OPA), and the retrosplenial complex (RSC). However, beyond establishing the general involvement of these regions in scene processing (i.e., responding more to images of scenes than to images of everyday objects or faces in human neuroimaging experiments), a fundamental and yet unanswered question remains: What precise role does each region play within the broad domain of human visual scene processing? In this talk, I will provide converging neural, causal, and developmental evidence that human visual scene processing is composed of three distinct systems: one we call the “scene categorization” system (including PPA), which is involved in recognizing a scene as a kind of place (e.g., a kitchen); another we call the “visually-guided navigation” (including OPA), which is involved in finding our way through the local environment, avoiding boundaries and obstacles; and a third we call the “map-based navigation” system (including RSC), which is involved in making our way from a specific place to some distant, out-of-sight place.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Developmental Brown Bag (DBB) is a speaker series dedicated to investigating developmental origins, trajectories and mechanisms. Speakers consider development from a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective.

Speaker: Jennifer Gómez, Boston University
Title: Cultural Betrayal, Sexual Abuse, & Healing: Implications for the Family

Abstract: The impact of child sexual abuse (CSA) on adult survivors is affected by the interpersonal and societal contexts in which the abuse occurs. According to betrayal trauma theory (Freyd, 1996), CSA perpetrated by someone close, like a parent, is classified as a high betrayal trauma because the abuse violates the child’s trust and/or dependence on the parent. Such high betrayal traumas are associated with costly mental, physical, and behavioral health outcomes (e.g., Adams-Clark et al., 2020). Moreover, family betrayal, such as family members’ unsupportive responses to a child’s CSA victimization, is further linked with dissociation and PTSD (Delker et al., 2018). In addition to this interpersonal context, structural racism (Mills, 1997) and intersectional oppression (e.g., interlocking racism and sexism; Collins, 1991) further impact Black female survivors. Specifically, cultural betrayal trauma theory (Gómez, 2012, 2023) proposes that if a Black father sexually abuses his Black daughter, the girl’s outcomes are impacted by both people experiencing discrimination in society. Specifically, because of structural racism, within-group violence–Black perpetrator, Black victim–includes a cultural betrayal harm because it violates the solidarity, or (intra)cultural trust, developed within the Black community that protects against the racism. Cultural betrayal trauma is associated with a range of outcomes, including dissociation, PTSD, and internalized prejudice (Gómez, 2023). Taken together, CSA that occurs within a Black family can include high betrayal (Freyd, 1996), family betrayal (Delker et al., 2018), and cultural betrayal (Gómez, 2023). Despite often being the site of intimate terrorism via male-perpetrated CSA and other violence in the home (United Nations General Assembly, 1993), the family unit can alternatively provide a haven for healing. In this talk, Dr. Gómez will review the literature on betrayal trauma theory (Freyd, 1996), family betrayal (Delker et al., 2018), structural racism (Buggs et al., 2020), intersectional oppression (Crenshaw, 1991), sexual violence (Gómez & Johnson, 2022), and cultural betrayal trauma theory (Gómez, 2023). She then will detail the strengths found in many Black families, including extended networks of support from elders, parents, siblings, children, other relatives, loved ones, and friends (McAdoo & Younge, 2009), who provide connection, cultural identity, safety, protection, and solidarity against oppression (e.g., hooks, 1984; Zinzow et al., 2021). Taken her from book, The Cultural Betrayal of Black Women & Girls: A Black Feminist Approach to Healing from Sexual Abuse (Gómez, 2023; American Psychological Association), she will then discuss avenues for Black women’s healing from CSA both within and outside of the family. Lastly, Dr. Gómez will close with hope for creating a world in which violence and inequality no longer exist. 

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Social & Cognitive Science Brown Bag Seminar Series

Location: Zoom, https://brown.zoom.us/j/95166664847

Speaker: Joseph Barnby, PhD, Royal Holloway University of London
Title: Between prudence and paranoia: The computational and biological mechanisms of adaptive and maladaptive social strategy

Abstract: Interpersonal relationships are a central feature of what it is to be human. Theory of Mind (ToM), or mentalising, is the ability to represent the hidden thoughts and beliefs of the self and others to navigate these relationships. This can be formalised as a set of computational processes involving learning, strategy, and self-other belief integration. When these processes go awry it can cause a rupture in close relationships, increasing psychiatric risk. Here I show how we can use computational models of social behaviour as assays to detect, test, and predict the psychological mechanisms underlying adaptive and maladaptive social strategy. I will present behavioural, pharmacological, and in silico data predicting and testing when sophisticated social strategy can be a boon or a curse; helping humans to navigate competitive contexts or exaggerate false threat beliefs. I discuss the utility of this computational framework and its relevance to the field of computational psychiatry.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Perception & Action Seminar

Speaker: Sean O’Bryan, Brown University

Speaker: Sean O’Bryan, Brown University
Title: Spatial working memory capacity and pupil diameter track learning dynamics in visuomotor adaptation

Abstract: Visuomotor adaptation (VMA) is a critical process that enables people to recalibrate their sensorimotor mappings to overcome unexpected perturbations. However, the mechanisms underlying substantial individual differences in VMA learning outcomes remain unclear. Typically, VMA is accomplished through an interplay of explicit and implicit learning: effortful, explicit processes that emerge early in learning are later complemented by slower, implicit processes driven by sensorimotor error. In a series of experiments, we first examined whether VMA is supported by domain-specific or general working memory capacity (WMc). After obtaining independent measures of spatial- and object-based WMc, participants completed visuomotor rotation tasks using a stylus and touch surface to reach for targets while the direction of the cursor was rotated 45° relative to the hand under conditions of continuous feedback (Exp. 1), delayed endpoint feedback (Exp. 2), or clamped feedback offset 45° relative to the target (Exp. 3). Our results revealed a domain-specific effect of WMc, such that higher spatial WMc predicted faster adaptation in explicit contexts (Exp. 1-2) and slower adaptation in implicit contexts (Exp. 3). Conversely, the association between object WMc and adaptation was largely weak or absent. In a second analysis, we computed task-evoked pupil diameter (PD) to test whether differences in internal cognitive states could further delineate VMA outcomes, predicting that PD could index variability in the effort exerted to overcome perturbations. We found that PD tracked learning, such that the initial exposure to the 45° rotation was accompanied by a period of relatively large PD across participants which decreased as learning progressed. More interestingly, analyses revealed a consistent association between larger PD and faster adaptation at the subject level, but only when explicit strategies were beneficial. Taken together, our results demonstrate a clear domain-specific contribution of spatial WMc to sensorimotor learning, and further suggest that PD may reflect the cognitive effort associated with different error reduction strategies in VMA.

Food for your Mood: Insights from Nutritional Psychiatry
Christine Farag, MD
Fellow, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Tower Health, Phoenixville Hospital
Wednesday, November 8, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/2023-2024-Child-Adolescent
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:
• Discuss the science and research behind nutritional recommendations for mental health
• Identify the role of nutritional psychiatry
• Recognize how modifications in diet can play a role in psychiatric treatment
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Farag has no financial relationships to disclose

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Social Cognitive Science Seminar

Location: Dome Room, Metcalf 305 and via Zoom, https://brown.zoom.us/j/95166664847

First Year Talks

Speaker: Laila Johnston
Title: Reasoning with Compositional Concepts in the Probabilistic Language of Thought

Abstract: Humans organize the world using concepts: we say that people run, and we generate and understand novel concepts, like running unicorns. How do we understand the meaning of these concepts? Past theories usually approached the study of concepts in one of two ways. Symbolic approaches directly specify conceptual meaning; running is an action with a defined, discrete set of properties. Symbols naturally compose to form complex novel concepts, but don’t allow for uncertainty in learning, representation, and reasoning. Statistical approaches learn from data and represent concepts probabilistically. These allow for uncertainty but lack the formal compositionality key to symbolic approaches; new concepts must be learned from scratch. Here we investigate the probabilistic language of thought hypothesis (PLoT), which expresses the compositional and probabilistic nature of concepts in a unified computational framework. We evaluate PLoT in an intuitive “tug-of-war” tournament scenario in which uncertainty and compositionality play key roles. For example, winner is defined as the team that most strongly pulls the rope, where team, pulling, and strength are also concepts in the model. PLoT model predictions closely track human judgements and compare favorably with alternative models, including large language models, demonstrating the viability of PLoT as a framework for how humans learn, represent, and reason with concepts.

Speaker: Ziwei Cheng
Title: Reward Processing in Depression: Insights from Complementary Computational Analyses

Abstract: Depression is a prevalent and disabling psychiatric condition that commonly emerges in adolescence and young adulthood and is associated with reward processing abnormalities. However, findings are mixed regarding the specific dimensions of reward processing that are altered in depression. In 726 adolescents and young adults varying in depressive symptoms and diagnoses, this study evaluated depression-related abnormalities in reward processing using the Probabilistic Reward Task (PRT) and complementary computational models. Analyses showed that both reinforcement learning and drift diffusion models explained reward-seeking behavior. Individuals with depressive disorders showed lower response bias compared to youth with no history of psychopathology, and higher levels of anhedonia were associated with slower evidence accumulation during decision-making. Parameters varied in reliability, and depression-related effects showed fair to adequate replication in cross-fold validation. Complementary modeling approaches provide insight into reward processes in depression, but results underscore the importance of evaluating parameter psychometrics and replicability of clinical effects.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Perception & Action Seminar

Speaker: Alan A Stocker, University of Pennsylvania
Title: The holistic nature of sensory perception

Abstract: Perception of a stimulus feature (e.g. the orientation of a Gabor patch) is commonly viewed as the result of an inference process of this feature. In this talk I challenge this widely established, reductionist view. I propose that perception rather emerges from a holistic inference process that operates not only at the feature but across all levels of a representational hierarchy. I present recent results from my laboratory testing this hypothesis in the context of a commonly used psychophysical matching task in which subjects are asked to report their perceived visual orientation of a test stimulus by adjusting a probe stimulus (method-of-adjustment). We derived a holistic matching model that assumes that subjects’ reports reflect an optimal match between the test and probe stimulus, both in terms of their inferred feature (orientation) but also their higher-level representation (orientation category). Validation of our model against five existing datasets demonstrates that the model accurately and comprehensively predicts subjects’ response behavior, and outperforms previous models both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results suggest that categorical effects in perceptual judgments are ubiquitous and can be parsimoniously explained as optimal behavior based on holistic sensory representations. These findings have substantial implications for our understanding of the neural information pathways and mechanisms underlying perceptual judgments.

The Behavior and Neurodata Core invites you to join MRI Research Facility Associate Director of Research and Carney Associate Professor of Brain Science Michael Worden for the second of a two-part lecture series on the Fundamentals of MRI Physics and Technology.

Part 1 - Wednesday, Oct. 25, 1p - 3p
Part 2 - Wednesday, Nov. 1, 1p - 3p

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an important scientific technique in the life sciences and in brain science, in particular. Researchers and other consumers of the scientific literature often struggle to understand the fundamentals of this technology and how the compelling images are related to underlying physical and physiological factors. This two-part lecture will explain at an intuitive level the basic functioning of the MRI scanner; the source of the MRI signal; the meaning of common MRI parameters (such as T1, T2, TR and TE) and how those parameters relate to image contrast; how images are created; and factors that influence image or data quality.

Improving Perinatal Mental Health Care: A Mother-Baby Psychiatric Day Hospital
Margaret Howard, PhD
Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Medicine
Clinician Educator - Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University
Division Director for Women’s Behavioral Health
Executive Director for Women’s Mental Health at Care New England
Wednesday, November 1, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-23-24
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:

• Describe mental health conditions that predominately impact perinatal individuals
• Describe impact of perinatal depression on infant development
• Describe WIH/Brown University Postpartum Depression Day Hospital Program
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Howard discloses the following financial relationships: Advisory board and Speakers Bureau – Sage Therapeutics

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Developmental Brown Bag (DBB) is a speaker series dedicated to investigating developmental origins, trajectories and mechanisms. Speakers consider development from a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective.

Speaker: Michelle Leichtman, University of New Hampshire 
Title: Memory for Educational Episodes: A Developmental Perspective 

Abstract: Memory in educational contexts typically connotes semantic processes required to learn facts and concepts. But episodic memories of one-point-in-time events may also play a deceptively important role in academic performance. In this talk, I explore the nature of specific memories of learning events, how they are scaffolded across early development, and the characteristics that may play a role in their persistence over time.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

Social Cognitive Science Seminar

Speaker: Jason Leng, Shenhav Lab
Title: Mutual inclusivity improves decision-making by smoothing out choice’s competitive edge

Abstract: Decision-making forms a central bottleneck to most of our tasks, one that people often experience as costly. To mitigate these costs, previous work has proposed adjusting one’s threshold for deciding (e.g., satisficing) to avoid over-deliberating. Here, we test an alternative solution to these costs, one that targets the basis for most choice costs: the fact that choosing one option sacrifices others (mutual exclusivity). Across 4 studies (N = 385), we test whether this tension can be relieved by framing choices as inclusive (allowing more than one option from a set, similar to a buffet), and whether doing so improves decision-making and the experience thereof. We find that inclusivity makes choices more efficient, because of its unique impact on the level of competition between potential responses as participants accumulate information for each of their options (resulting in a more “race”-like decision process). We find that inclusivity also reduces the subjective costs associated with choice, making people feel less conflicted in conditions where it was hard to choose which good option to acquire or which bad option to get rid of. These inclusivity benefits were distinct from those achieved when trying to merely reduce deliberation (e.g., tightening one’s deadline), which we show can in some cases lead to similar increases in efficiency but only carry the potential to diminish not improve the experience of choosing. This work collectively provides key mechanistic insights into the conditions under which decision making is most costly, and a novel approach aimed at mitigating those costs.

The Behavior and Neurodata Core invites you to join MRI Research Facility Associate Director of Research and Carney Associate Professor of Brain Science Michael Worden for the first of a two-part lecture series on the Fundamentals of MRI Physics and Technology.

Part 1 - Wednesday, Oct. 25, 1p - 3p
Part 2 - Wednesday, Nov. 1, 1p - 3p

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is an important scientific technique in the life sciences and in brain science, in particular. Researchers and other consumers of the scientific literature often struggle to understand the fundamentals of this technology and how the compelling images are related to underlying physical and physiological factors. This two-part lecture will explain at an intuitive level the basic functioning of the MRI scanner; the source of the MRI signal; the meaning of common MRI parameters (such as T1, T2, TR and TE) and how those parameters relate to image contrast; how images are created; and factors that influence image or data quality.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Developmental Brown Bag (DBB) is a speaker series dedicated to investigating developmental origins, trajectories and mechanisms. Speakers consider development from a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective.

Speaker: Liran Samuni, Harvard University

Title: Cooperation and competition in chimpanzees and bonobos

Abstract: More than any other species, humans exhibit an extraordinary capacity for cooperation that transcends social boundaries, spanning from close relationships with family and friends to extensive networks that include distant acquaintances and even strangers. Cooperation and our tendency for mutual reliance are thought to support our prolonged life-histories to allow humans to expand across the globe. However, the same capacity for cooperation can also fuel intergroup conflict and violence, resulting in discriminatory and prejudicial behavior. Studying the evolutionary roots of the interplay between cooperation and competition is key to understand the social dynamics of current human societies.
In this talk I will present some of my research on the mechanisms underlying violence and cooperation among our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, as a window into our evolutionary past. These two species share similar life-histories and social environments but exhibit significant differences in patterns of dominance, social relationships, and out-group attitudes. By leveraging and evaluating the similarities and differences between them, I will present some work on the role of social relationships and mutual reliance in informing cooperation and competition in the two species.

Join us on Monday, October 23th, for a BNC workshop where we will provide a comprehensive overview of the XNAT neuroimaging data platform, in addition to showcasing the latest features in our data processing tools. During the workshop, we will guide you step-by-step through our documentation, while offering our best practices and demonstrating a live demo of our data processing pipeline alongside a new utility script for running on Oscar.

Whether you’re new to XNAT or an experienced user, this workshop is designed to help you stay up-to-date with our most recent changes to xnat-tools and oscar-scripts, which are now available to your lab. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of our xnat2bids pipeline and be able to export your data onto Oscar.

Here is a list of new features that we will cover:

- Automatic Data Directory Sync on Oscar

- New Configuration Options to Export By Project / Subject ID

- Exporting EEG / Physio Data with BIDS Conversion

At BNC, we place a high priority on community feedback and participation in shaping the development of our software tools. We recognize that users’ needs evolve over time and that continuous improvement requires ongoing engagement and dialogue. That’s why we encourage you to participate in this workshop and provide us with your feedback on how we can better align our software tools with your needs.

Lunch will be provided.

RSVP Link: https://forms.gle/uE6WxBoLE566vpp86

***IMPORTANT INFORMATION BELOW***

-You will need to have an XNAT account to participate in this workshop. Please sign up using the following steps in our documentation: Accessing XNAT

- You will also need to have an Oscar account to participate in this workshop. Please register for an account at the following link: https://brown.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0GtBE8kWJpmeG4B

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Perception & Action Seminar Series explores a wide range of research in the domain of human perception and controlling action.

Speaker: Aarlenne Khan, Université de Montréal

Title: The mechanisms of spatial and non-spatial inhibition

Abstract: This talk investigates different kinds of spatial and non-spatial inhibition. We investigate commonalities and differences in spatial inhibition mechanisms in overt and covert attention, as well as the role of the posterior parietal in spatial and response inhibition. We show that during overt attention, spatial inhibition mechanisms are heightened compared to during covert attention. We also highlight the primary role of the posterior parietal cortex in spatial inhibition mechanisms, specifically in resolving spatial competition, e.g. during the execution of anti-saccades. Finally, we show evidence for the independence of spatial inhibition and response inhibition mechanisms.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Developmental Brown Bag (DBB) is a speaker series dedicated to investigating developmental origins, trajectories and mechanisms. Speakers consider development from a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective.

Speaker: Iris Berent, Northeastern University

Title: Can We Get Human Nature Right?

Abstract: Few questions in science are as controversial as human nature. At stake is whether our basic concepts and emotions are all learned from experience, or whether some are innate. Here, I demonstrate that reasoning about innateness is biased by the basic workings of the human mind.
Psychological science suggests that newborns possess core concepts of “object” and “number”. Laypeople, however, believe that newborns are devoid of such notions, but that they can innately recognize emotions. Moreover, people presume that concepts are learned, whereas emotions (along with sensations and actions) are innate.
I trace these beliefs to two tacit psychological principles: intuitive Dualism and Essentialism. Essentialism guides tacit reasoning about biological inheritance and suggests that innate traits reside in the body; per intuitive Dualism, however, the mind seems ethereal, distinct from the body. It thus follows that, in our intuitive psychology, concepts (which people falsely consider as disembodied) must be learned, whereas emotions, sensations and emotions (which are considered embodied) are likely innate; these predictions are in line with the experimental results.
In this talk, I demonstrate how these intuitive biases taint our understanding of human nature, derail science, and quite possibly, give rise to the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Perception & Action Seminar Series explores a wide range of research in the domain of human perception and controlling action.

Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Grand Rounds
The Impact of Climate Change on Pediatric Mental Health
Joshua Wortzel, MD, MPhil, MS(Ed)
Brown University Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellow
R-25 Research Track
Wednesday, October 11, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/2023-2024-Child-Adolescent
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:
• Describe the relationship of temperature with the prevalence of mental health disorders
• Review the neuropsychiatric sequelae of nutritional deficiencies and vector-borne illnesses secondary to climate change
• Discuss the traumatic and existential impacts of climate change on pediatric mental health
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Wortzel has no financial relationships to disclose

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Perception & Action Seminar Series explores a wide range of research in the domain of human perception and controlling action.

Speaker: Peter Neri, École Normale Supérieure (virtual)

Title: The unreasonable recalcitrance of human vision to theoretical domestication

Abstract: We can view cortex from two fundamentally different perspectives: a powerful device for performing optimal inference, or an assembly of biological components not built for achieving statistical optimality. The former approach is attractive thanks to its elegance and potentially wide applicability, however the basic facts of human pattern vision do not support it. Instead, they indicate that the idiosyncratic behaviour produced by visual cortex is largely dictated by its hardware components. The output of these components can be steered towards optimality by our cognitive apparatus, but only to a marginal extent. We conclude that current theories of visually-guided behaviour are at best inadequate, and we turn to neural networks in an attempt to establish whether the idiosyncratic character of human vision may be learnt from a larger repertoire of functional constraints, such as the statistics of the natural environment. We challenge deep convolutional networks with the same stimuli/tasks used with human observers and apply equivalent characterization of the stimulus–response coupling. For shallow depth of behavioural characterization, some variants of network-architecture/training-protocol produce human-like trends; however, more articulate empirical descriptors expose glaring discrepancies. Our results urge caution in assessing whether neural networks do or do not capture human behavior: ultimately, our ability to assess ‘‘success’’ in this area can only be as good as afforded by the depth of behavioral characterization against which the network is evaluated. More generally, our results provide a compelling demonstration of how far we still are from securing an adequate computational account of even the most basic operations carried out by human vision.

The Annual Dr. Henrietta Leonard Visiting Professor Academic Grand Rounds*
Somos Esenciales/We are Essential: Community-led and Academic Partnered Research for Advancing Mental Health Equity
Lisa R. Fortuna, MD, MPH, MDiv
Professor and Chair of Psychiatry and Neurosciences
University of California, Riverside
School of Medicine
Wednesday, October 4, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-23-24
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:

• Consider increasing opportunities for engaging with community in mental health services research and for driving health equity policy
• Describe principles for co-design of mental health innovations, including digital interventions aimed at improving mental health disparities
• Discuss the health equity model for designing mental health services that consider social and structural determinants of mental health
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Fortuna has no financial relationships to disclose.
This activity is not supported by a commercial entity ~ For more information, please contact [email protected]

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series

The Developmental Brown Bag (DBB) is a speaker series dedicated to investigating developmental origins, trajectories and mechanisms. Speakers consider development from a cognitive, social, and cultural perspective.

Speaker: Ashley Thomas, Harvard University

Title: Intuitive Theory of Social Relationships

Abstract:

Every day, we recognize social relationships and use knowledge about social relationships to inform our behavior. For example, we recognize that it is acceptable to eat off our spouse’s plate, but unacceptable to eat off our employer’s plate. We may laugh at our boss’s joke to maintain our deferential relationship or do a favor for a coworker to maintain a cooperative one. Previous research on social cognitive development has largely focused on infants’ and children’s social reasoning either at the microscale of an individual person’s actions, thoughts, and beliefs (e.g., ‘theory of mind’), or at the macroscale, of societal groups and social categories (e.g., ingroups and outgroups, gender, or race). My research program is situated between these scales, focusing on how humans think about relationships between individuals which we depend on for our survival and wellbeing. In this talk I will consider findings from developmental psychology and propose that throughout our lives, our representations of social relationships are intuitive theories. I propose three central components of this intuitive theory: evaluating whether a relationship exists; categorizing it into a model (i.e., type, schema, concept) and computing its strength (i.e., intensity, pull, or thickness). Following Relational Models Theory (Fiske, 1991, 2004), I propose that from infancy, humans recognize relationships that belong to three models: communal sharing (where people see themselves as one), authority ranking (where people see themselves as ranked), and equality matching (where people see themselves as separate and track reciprocity). A single relationship can be organized according to any of these models depending on the context, but relationships tend to use a dominant model. The other component is a relationship’s strength and can be thought of as a continuous representation of obligations (the extent to which certain actions are expected and morally evaluated), and commitment (the likelihood that people will continue the relationship). In communal sharing relationships this may be felt as attachment, in authority ranking relationships it may be felt as allegiance or loyalty, and in equality matching relationships it may be felt as trust. One hypothesis regarding strength is that the stronger a connection, the less interchangeable the person or people. These representations, and the assumption that others share them, allow us to form, maintain and change social relationships by informing how we interpret and evaluate the actions of others and plan our own.

Abstract: Across childhood and adolescence, sleep is influenced by a multitude of factors that are rooted in biological and social contexts. Sleep, in turn, is a driver of development, from mental health to cognitive functioning. Drawing on findings from a decade-long investigation, Dr. Mona El-Sheikh will present a developmental perspective for examining sleep in youth; discuss relations between family processes and sleep; and illustrate the role of sleep in the exacerbation and mitigation of health disparities.

Please mark your calendars for the next MRF/BNC Users meeting, which will be Monday, Sep. 18th, at noon in the Carney Innovation Zone at 164 Angell St. We hope to see you in person but we will again have a Zoom option for those wishing to tune in remotely.

This month, Gill LeBlanc will present past work from her master’s thesis: “The Sexually Dimorphic Brain: Variations in White Matter Integrity and Exercise-Induced Plasticity in a Rodent Model of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders”

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP for this event to help us gauge attendance for our food order.

RSVP: https://forms.gle/m9wM2vG1d8pZsMSd7

“Henrietta Leonard, A Triple Board Resident, and Delirium – A Long Story Not Yet Complete”
Lara P. Nelson, MD
Associate Professor of Pediatrics
Acting Chief, Critical Care Medicine
Children’s Hospital Los Angeles
Wednesday, September 13, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/2023-2024-Child-Adolescent
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:
• Review what makes delirium so challenging to diagnose in children
• Begin to consider longer term complications of delirium
• Find opportunities for partnership between Pediatrics and Child Psychiatry
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Nelson has no financial relationships to disclose

Emotional Changes with Aging and Neurodegenerative Illness: The False Divide Between Psychiatry and Neurology
Edward (Ted) Huey, MD
Director, Memory and Aging Program, Butler Hospital
Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
Associate Director for Clinical Research, Brown Center for AD Research
Alpert Medical School of Brown University
Wednesday, September 6, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
• PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-23-24
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:

• Understand recent developments in neurodegeneration and how they impact psychiatric practice
• Understand what lesion studies teach us about the neuroanatomical bases of emotional processing
• Understand how these findings above can impact the treatment of neuropsychiatric symptoms in neurodegenerative illness
Financial Relationship Disclosure: Dr. Huey has no financial relationships to disclose.

Dispelling the Myths and Misinformation: What is Gender Affirmative Care?

Jason Rafferty, MD, MPH, EdM
Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior
Alpert Medical School at Brown University

Wednesday, August 2, 2023◊ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
PRE-REGISTRATION REQUIRED: https://cme-learning.brown.edu/DPHB-22-23
Objectives: At the conclusion of this presentation, participants should be better able to:

• Recognize the essential aspects of the gender affirmative care model and how it applies to youth and their families
• Appreciate how cumulative trauma and stigma contributes to mental health disparities and ways providers can foster resiliency
• Discuss the importance of family support and ways providers can foster parental understanding and acceptance

Dr. Rafferty has no financial relationships to disclose.

The Carney Center for Computational Brain Science and the Brainstorm Program is organizing a two-week computational modeling workshop with a focus on computational modeling of cognition, behavior, and brain/behavior relationships. Workshop attendees will learn the basic tools for understanding, developing, and applying models to brain science questions, and have the opportunity to apply these techniques in a novel dataset.

Week 1 will consist of workshops and live tutorials, including daily lectures spanning basic to advanced topics, accompanied by hands-on coding tutorials. Attendees will learn the basic tools for understanding, developing and applying computational models, with a focus on hypothesis testing, quantitative fitting, bayesian methods, and model checks and comparisons. Additionally, advanced modeling sessions will provide a deeper theoretical understanding and application of complex modeling techniques.

During Week 2, participants will have the opportunity to work in teams to apply these skills to analyze a real dataset provided by the organizers, with potential for novel discoveries. Prizes will be awarded for models with the most predictive power, rigor, creativity, and innovation.

For details on last years’ workshops and modeling competition, visit the Center for Computational Brain Science website. Previous syllabi are available here. We will cover most of the same basic topics, with a few tweaks and additions (based on participant input and guest speakers).

Intended Audience: This workshop is open to the members of the Brown community, and is designed for researchers across fields, backgrounds and levels of experience: computation “novices” with no experience and those with more computational experience who may want to augment their toolkit with advanced approaches to parameter estimation or specific classes of models. Although there is no computational experience required, those with modeling backgrounds will still benefit from the advanced modules, and will have the opportunity to learn new skills and state-of-the-art computational approaches.

Maximum number of participants: Participation is limited to 20, but we do keep a waitlist.

Register here.

Organizers: Andra Geana, Debbie Yee, Alana Jaskir, Michael Frank