CCN/NYU Seminar with Jan Drugowitsch (Harvard)

Wednesday Apr 17, 2024, 4:00 PM → 5:00 PM America/New_York

4th Floor Conference Room - 416/4-Simons Foundation (160 5th Avenue)

CCN and the Center for Neural Science at NYU invite CCN and NYU community members to a seminar with Jan Drugowitsch, Associate Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School.  Please find Jan's title and abstract copied below.

Jan's seminar will followed by a reception in the 3rd Floor MPR Conference Center. 

Talk title:  Simple mechanisms for complex decisions
 

Abstract:  

Recent experiments suggest that decisions in many tasks appear to rely on surprisingly simple neural mechanisms. Do we observe such simple mechanisms only because we are looking at simple tasks? I will argue that such simple mechanisms in fact implement the normative decision strategy for a wide range of increasingly complex tasks. Furthermore, they are close-to-optimal also for tasks in which the normative decision strategy is more complex. Lastly, simple mechanisms can adapt more quickly to changing requirements than complex ones. For all of these reasons, the brain might have acquired simple mechanisms even for complex decisions.