A Snapshot seminar hosted by the School of Physiology, Pharmacology and Neuroscience
Abstract: In order to survive, animals must flexibly update their behaviour in response to changes in the environment. This ability to adapt ongoing behaviour is one of the most fundamental of cognitive processes, yet its underlying neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. The framework of predictive processing provides a simple yet powerful way of describing flexible behaviour. Animals detect discrepancies between predicted and observed events, a ‘prediction-error’. The prediction-error guides updating of the animal’s model of the world and thus its ongoing behaviour. While this account has widespread support across humans, monkeys and rodents, the neural circuit basis of this process is largely unknown. In this talk, I will describe my lab’s recent results from studying mouse prefrontal cortex to address the following question: What neural circuits enable animals to compute prediction-errors, and flexibly adapt their behaviour?
If you would like to chat with the speaker while they are here, please get in touch with the host, Paul (p.chadderton@bristol.ac.uk).