Neuroscience Institute › Events › Lecture Series › Neuroscience Institute Distinguished Speaker Series

Neuroscience Institute Distinguished Speaker Series

The Neuroscience Institute is honored to host distinguished lecturers on research topics that include cognitive, systems, or computational neuroscience or neuro-tech and engineering.

Upcoming Speakers

April 24, 2025 11:30AM

Tom Griffiths, Ph.D.

Professor of Psychology and Computer Science
Director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and Princeton Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence
Princeton University

Mellon Institute 348

Title: The rational use of cognitive resources

Abstract: Psychologists and computer scientists have very different views of the mind. Psychologists tell us that humans are error-prone, using simple heuristics that result in systematic biases. Computer scientists view human intelligence as aspirational, trying to capture it in artificial intelligence systems. How can we reconcile these two perspectives? In this talk, I will argue that we can do so by reconsidering how we think about rational action. Psychologists have long used the standard of rationality from economics, which focuses on choosing the best action without considering the computational difficulty of that choice. By using a standard of rationality inspired by computer science, in which the quality of the outcome trades off with the amount of computation involved, we obtain new models of human behavior that can help us understand the cognitive strategies that people adopt. I will present examples of this approach in the context of human decision-making and planning, including complex planning problems such as the game of chess.

Bio: Tom Griffiths is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Information Technology, Consciousness and Culture in the Departments of Psychology and Computer Science at Princeton University. His research explores connections between human and machine learning, using ideas from statistics and artificial intelligence to understand how people solve the challenging computational problems they encounter in everyday life. He has made contributions to the development of Bayesian models of cognition, probabilistic machine learning, nonparametric Bayesian statistics, and models of cultural evolution, and his recent work has demonstrated how methods from cognitive science can shed light on modern artificial intelligence systems. Tom completed his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University in 2005, and taught at Brown University and the University of California, Berkeley before moving to Princeton. He has received awards for his research from organizations ranging from the American Psychological Association to the National Academy of Sciences and is a co-author of the book Algorithms to Live By, introducing ideas from computer science and cognitive science to a general audience.

May 7, 2025 12:00PM

David Robbe

Zoom: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/92302782235?pwd=DNnZTiX9Xm3Xq4CKZ5LmGoge7oZzuW.1

Title: What the hell is the dorsal striatum for?

Abstract: A well-accepted idea in systems neuroscience is that different types of memories are stored in specific brain regions or networks. Within this framework, the dorsal striatum is believed to play a critical role in learning and recalling/selecting adaptive actions, sometimes also referred to as procedural skills. Although many studies support this view, it is not without paradoxical observations—such as the modest memory or decisional alterations following lesions of the basal ganglia output nuclei. Additionally, the strong influence of sensorimotor cortical dynamics over striatal activity suggests that action selection might involve extended cortical and subcortical networks, raising the question of the specific contribution of the dorsal striatum. I will present recent and ongoing work from our team (and others) supporting the view that the dorsal striatum's contribution to action selection may be related to tuning the motivational underpinnings of reward-oriented behaviors, and more specifically, setting an adaptive tradeoff between time and effort. I will discuss how such a motivational function is relevant to understanding brain disorders such as Parkinson's disease and depression.

Bio: David Robbe is an INSERM research director and leads the "Cortico-Basal Ganglia Circuits and Behaviour" team at the Institute of Neurobiology of the Mediterranean (INMED, Marseille). After completing his PhD in Montpellier on the molecular determinants of synaptic plasticity in the ventral striatum, David Robbe did his postdoc in Gyorgy Buzsaki's lab where is studied study the relationship between neuronal population dynamics in the hippocampus and spatial memory. David Robbe then led a research team in Barcelona as part of the Ramon-y-Cajal program before joining INMED in 2012.
His current research aims to understand how economic constraints, such as time, effort, and expected rewards, influence both decision-making and movement speed, and how these modulations evolve depending on the animals' internal state and environment. Additionally, he investigates the role of the striatum in these behavioural modulations. To this end, his team develops ethologically inspired behavioural tests (e.g., foraging in freely moving rodents) and combines modeling with neurophysiological techniques (acute/chronic recording of neural ensembles, global/circuit-specific perturbation). His long-term goal is to better understand how motivational factors and neurobiological determinants interact to shape behaviour and how they may dysfunction in certain pathological conditions (depression, Parkinson’s disease, etc.), while avoiding as much as possible reductionism and the "brain a computing device" analogy.

Previous Speakers

March 20th, 2025

Tatiana Engel

Assistant Professor, Princeton University Neuroscience Institute

Talk Title: Unifying neural population dynamics, manifold geometry, and single-cell selectivity

December 5, 2024

Andrew Pruszynski, Western

October 10th, 2024

Eva Dyer, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech

Talk Title: Large-scale pretraining on neural data allows for transfer across individuals, tasks and species

January 18, 2024

Anne Churchland

Professor of Neurobiology, UCLA

Talk Title: Movements and engagement during decision-making

November 16, 2023

Jörn Diedrichsen

Western Research Chair for Motor Control and Computational Neuroscience Brain and Mind Institute, Department for Computer Science, Department for Statistical and Actuarial Sciences
University of Western Ontario

Talk Title: What is the function of the human cerebellum? Studying cortico-cerebellar loops across functional domains.

October 26, 2023

Jonathan Pillow

Professor of Neuroscience, Princeton University

Talk Title: New methods for understanding the dynamics of animal decision-making behavior

Location: Mellon Institute Social Room, 328 or Zoom

September 28, 2023

Jennifer Groh

Professor of Psychology & Neuroscience, Neurobiology, Computer Science, and Biomedical Engineering, Duke University. Lab Director of the SPACE Lab

Talk Title: Computing the Location(s) of Sounds in the Visual Scene
Location: Mellon Institute 328 & Zoom

May 25, 2023

Stéphanie Lacour

Bertarelli Chair in Neuroprosthetic Technology Laboratory of Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces (LSBI), EPFL

Location: Virtual - Zoom

4:00 p.m.

April 13, 2023

Li-Huei Tsai

Director, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT
Picower Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Senior Associate Member, Broad Institute

Uncovering the Role of Alzheimer's Disease Risk Genes Using Stem Cells and Human Brains

March 2, 2023

Kia Nobre, FBA, MAE, fNASc

Chair, Translational Cognitive Neuroscience; Oxford
Director, Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity
Professional Fellow, St Catherine's College

Turning Attention Inside Out

March 24, 2022

Helen Mayberg, M.D.

Professor, Director, Center of Advanced Circuit Therapeutics;
Professor, Neurology, Neurosurgery, Psychiatry and Neuroscience; Mount Sinai Professor of Neurotherapeutics, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Machine Learning Strategies to Track Brain and Behavioral State Changes During DBS Treatment for Depression

March 17, 2022

Kalanit Grill-Spector, Ph.D.

Professor; Department of Psychology
Chair, Department of Psychology
Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Stanford University, CA

Human Visual Cortex as a Window into the Developing Brain.

March 3, 2022

Daniel Wolpert, FMedSci FRS

Professor of Neuroscience
Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute
Columbia University, New York

Contextual inference underlies the learning of sensorimotor repertoires.

January 27, 2022

Elizabeth A. Buffalo, Ph.D.

Professor and Chair Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine; Interim Associate Director for Research, Washington National Primate Research Center

Reconciling the Spatial and Mnemonic Views of the Hippocampus

May 6, 2021

Yael Niv

Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Princeton Neuroscience Institute

Latent causes, prediction errors, and the organization of memory

April 8, 2021

Carlos Brody

Wilbur H. Gantz III ’59 Professor of Neuroscience and Professor of Molecular Biology, Princeton University
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Neural sources of individual variability in cognitive behavior

April 1, 2021

Larry Abbott

William Bloor Professor of Theoretical Neuroscience and Co-director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, Columbia University
Principal Investigator, Columbia's Zuckerman Institute

Vector computations in the fly brain

March 11, 2021

Lena H. Ting

John and Jan Portman Professor of Biomedical Engineering
W.H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology
Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Division of Physical Therapy, Emory University
Co-Director, Georgia Tech and Emory Neural Engineering Centers

What does a muscle sense? Multiscale interactions governing muscle spindle sensory signals

December 3, 2020

Michael Yartsev

Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Engineering
Robertson Investigator, New York Stem Cell Foundation
Helen Wills Institute of Neuroscience Graduate Program
UC Berkeley Biophysics Graduate Program
UC Berkeley-UCSF Graduate Program in Bioengineering
University of California at Berkeley

Studying the Neural basis of Complex Spatial, Social and Acoustic Behaviors – in Freely Behaving and Flying Bats

May 7, 2020

Lucas Parra

Harold Shames Professor of Biomedical Engineering, City College of New York (CCNY)

Mechanisms and Optimization of Transcranial Electric Stimulation

September 17, 2019

Edward Chang

Neurological Surgery, University of California, San Francisco

The Encoding of Speech Sounds in Human Temporal Lobe