QLS Guest Seminar - Thursday, 9 January 11h00am

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

QLS Guest Seminar - Thursday, 9 January 11h00am

ICTP, Central Area, 2nd floor, SISSA Building, via Beirut 2

Speaker: Gaia Tavoni - Department of Physics & Astronomy University of 
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Title: Statistical physics approaches to cognition and computations in 
the brain

Abstract:
Statistical physics is a powerful tool for addressing central questions 
in neuroscience. I will illustrate this in three examples -- a cognitive 
process that engages the whole brain, a sensory learning process driven 
by a complex distributed circuit, and a pattern recognition problem in 
neural population responses. In the first example, I will consider a 
question in cognitive control: the optimal allocation of mental 
resources for the inference of latent states from noisy observations. 
Specifically, I will show that by analyzing the complexity of a 
hierarchy of models derived from Bayesian principles it is possible to 
understand when and why different cognitive functions are engaged in 
inference processes. In the second example, I will present a statistical 
model of the olfactory system that proposes how the brain can modulate 
stochastic neural responses to sensory stimuli to enable perceptual 
learning. In the third example, I will illustrate novel statistical 
mechanics methods, based on the inference and simulation of functional 
network models, that allow extraction of informative patterns from high 
dimensional neural data, providing powerful tools for studying the 
processes of memory formation and consolidation in the brain.

Web page: http://indico.ictp.it/event/9272/

Everyone interested is most welcome to attend!

-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
www.ictp.it/research/qls.aspx
e-mail: qls at ictp.it