Title: "Of Rats and Robots: Approaches for studying neural circuits underlying social behavior."
Speaker: Andrea A. Chiba, Professor, Department of Cognitive Science and Program in Neuroscience, University of California San Diego, San Diego, California. Co-Founder Global Science of Learning for Education Network
Gaining an understanding of the neural circuits essential to social behavior in rodents can be challenging due to the need for relatively unconstrained experiments. Robots can be used as a tool for understanding social encounters with other rats and for gaining an understanding of the coordinated dynamics of neural circuits involved in social appraisal. Dr. Chiba will address an approach for building tools to study aspects of social appraisal and prosociality.