Event Details:
Organizing knowledge for flexible behavior
Abstract
Animals behave flexibly, seamlessly generalising knowledge between apparently different scenarios. This is the hallmark of intelligence. To do this, representations and computations in the brain must also be flexible and generalise. Here we describe several pieces of work on understanding the representations of tasks that can be decomposed into separate building blocks. First, we describe a hippocampal model for learning building blocks and generalising them to novel situations. This model accounts for numerous cell types in hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, and can be related to transformer neural networks. Second, we describe a theoretical result that says different building blocks should be represented by different neural populations, and accounts for novel data such as grid cells warping. Last, we investigate how individual building blocks should be represented and in doing so provide a normative theory of entorhinal grid cells.
James Whittington
Stanford University & University of Oxford
James Whittingston is a Sir Henry Wellcome Scholar split between Stanford and Oxford. He did his PhD with Rafal Bogacz and Tim Behrens at Oxford. Before then, his undergraduate study was in Physics at the University of Oxford, and had a quick detour to become medical doctor.
About the Wu Tsai Neuro MBCT Seminar Series The Stanford Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology Seminars (MBCT) explores ways in which computational and technical approaches are being used to advance the frontiers of neuroscience. It features speakers from other institutions, Stanford faculty and senior training program trainees.