Yael Niv, Ph.D., November 18, 2020

"Latent Causes, Prediction Errors, and the Organization of Memory"

William K. Warren, Jr.  Frontiers in Neuroscience Lecture 
Virtual Presentation via Zoom (email for details)
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm     Program

Yael Niv received her MA in Psychobiology from Tel Aviv University and her PhD in Computational Neuroscience from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, having conducted a major part of her thesis research at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit in UCL. She is currently a professor at Princeton University, at the Psychology Department and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute. Her lab's research focuses on the neural and computational processes underlying reinforcement learning and decision making, with a particular focus on how the cognitive processes of attention, memory and learning interact in constructing task representations that allow efficient learning and decision making. She is co-founder and co-director of the Rutgers-Princeton Center for Computational Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, where she is applying ideas from reinforcement learning to questions pertaining to psychiatric disorders within the new field of computational psychiatry. 

Learning objectives: 

1. Participants will understand what is a latent cause in learning theory.
2. Participants will understand why latent causes are useful in organizing memories.
3. Participants will understand the role of prediction errors in segmenting latent causes and, therefore, in organizing episodic memories