James Hinman, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Illinois, will lecture on “Neural basis of cognitive maps in multiple reference frames” at 4:00 pm in 2269 Beckman Institute and on Zoom September 7, 2022. One of our MBM trainees will give an introduction.
The lecture is free and open to the public courtesy of the Miniature Brain Machinery Program. Click for Zoom details.
Abstract:
All animals navigate to goals, often to find food or safety. Given the evolutionary importance of goal directed navigation, it is not surprising that numerous brain circuits represent spatial information. The hippocampal formation maintains a world-centered, or allocentric, representation of the world and is utilized for plotting goal-directed routes. Cortico-striatal circuits represent spatial information in an egocentric reference frame, one centered on the agent.
An interesting computational problem arises as information must be transformed between allocentric and egocentric reference frames in order for you to act on that information, a transformation that your brain is constantly performing with great ease. I’ll discuss my work on the neural basis of spatial representations and several new directions that our research is moving.
