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Translational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

 
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A superlist combining individual seminars and series from other lists on talks.cam. These Neuroscience-themed seminars will be advertised throughout the relevant interest group in Cambridge.
Updated: 43 sec ago

Mon 20 May 10:00: Integrated Spin model with global inhibition for decision making

48 min 11 sec ago
Integrated Spin model with global inhibition for decision making

Humans and other organisms make decisions choosing between different options, with the aim to maximize the reward. The main theoretical framework for modeling the decision-making process has been based on the highly successful drift-diffusion model, which is a simple tool for explaining many aspects of this process. Recently, it was found that during high cognitive load and situations of uncertainty, inhibition of neuronal firing increases, but the origin of this phenomenon is not understood. Motivated by this observation, we extend a recently developed model for decision-making while animals move towards targets in real space. We introduce an Ising-type model, which includes global inhibition, and explore its role in the decision-making process. This model can explain how the brain may utilize modulation of inhibition to improve its decision-making accuracy. Compared to experimental results, this model suggests that the regime of the brain’s decision-making activity is in proximity to a critical state. Within the model, the critical region near the transition line has the advantageous property of enabling a significant decrease in error with a small increase in inhibition and also exhibits unique properties with respect to learning and memory decay.

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Wed 08 May 15:00: Radicalisation and Violent Extremism: Trends, Drivers, Solutions

8 hours 27 min ago
Radicalisation and Violent Extremism: Trends, Drivers, Solutions

Incel, conspiracy theorist, and neo-Nazi movements once belonged on the fringes of the political spectrum. Today, their ideas are becoming more widespread, accelerated by global conflict, economic crisis, and rapid technological change. Extremists across the world have skillfully expanded their reach by using cutting-edge technologies. They have also attracted the youngest generations by gamifying their communication and impacted politics by entering surprising coalitions. In recent years, online campaigns to intimidate politicians, journalists, and activists, as well as online efforts to radicalise wider groups of people towards violence, have become increasingly common. Security experts have warned that both mainstream and fringe cyberspaces (so-called alt-tech platforms) have turned into hotbeds for viral hate and the inspiration of violence. This has often left security services overwhelmed with the sheer amount of potential threats to national security.

Yet, not everyone who makes explicit threats of violence will translate their words into action. Likewise, not everyone who will commit an act of extreme violence threatens to do so beforehand. Some will even intentionally scratch the boundaries of legality by using the rhetorical weapon of satire, leading intelligence officers into a tricky security-versus-freedom dilemma. Judgement on whether a user who engages in “shitposting” constitutes a risk to violence can be difficult; yet the stakes are high. The intersection of satire and hate has escalated in a new phenomenon of political violence: gamified terrorism. As we have been able to observe the growing relationship between trolling and terrorism, traditional counter-terrorism mechanisms have become increasingly unhelpful in assessing and dealing with this emerging threat.

Based on her research, Dr Julia Ebner will give insights into patterns of radicalisation across different ideologies as well as emerging global trends in extremist mobilisation. Throughout the seminar, she will address questions such as: Why have outlandish extremist ideas taken hold in liberal democracies and how do they spread online? What are the pull and push factors that drive radicalisation, and when do they pose a risk for national security? Can would-be perpetrators of extreme violence be reliably identified by the linguistic traces they unintentionally leave behind in their online communications? In closing, she will propose a set of solutions to tackle the spread of violent extremism and to prevent acts of terrorism.

This talk is in person only and is hosted by Edoardo Chidichimo.

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Wed 08 May 15:00: Radicalisation and Violent Extremism: Trends, Drivers, Solutions

8 hours 35 min ago
Radicalisation and Violent Extremism: Trends, Drivers, Solutions

Incel, conspiracy theorist, and neo-Nazi movements once belonged on the fringes of the political spectrum. Today, their ideas are becoming more widespread, accelerated by global conflict, economic crisis, and rapid technological change. Extremists across the world have skillfully expanded their reach by using cutting-edge technologies. They have also attracted the youngest generations by gamifying their communication and impacted politics by entering surprising coalitions. In recent years, online campaigns to intimidate politicians, journalists, and activists, as well as online efforts to radicalise wider groups of people towards violence, have become increasingly common. Security experts have warned that both mainstream and fringe cyberspaces (so-called alt-tech platforms) have turned into hotbeds for viral hate and the inspiration of violence. This has often left security services overwhelmed with the sheer amount of potential threats to national security. Yet, not everyone who makes explicit threats of violence will translate their words into action. Likewise, not everyone who will commit an act of extreme violence threatens to do so beforehand. Some will even intentionally scratch the boundaries of legality by using the rhetorical weapon of satire, leading intelligence officers into a tricky security-versus-freedom dilemma. Judgement on whether a user who engages in “shitposting” constitutes a risk to violence can be difficult; yet the stakes are high. The intersection of satire and hate has escalated in a new phenomenon of political violence: gamified terrorism. As we have been able to observe the growing relationship between trolling and terrorism, traditional counter-terrorism mechanisms have become increasingly unhelpful in assessing and dealing with this emerging threat. Based on her research, Dr Julia Ebner will give insights into patterns of radicalisation across different ideologies as well as emerging global trends in extremist mobilisation. Throughout the seminar, she will address questions such as: Why have outlandish extremist ideas taken hold in liberal democracies and how do they spread online? What are the pull and push factors that drive radicalisation, and when do they pose a risk for national security? Can would-be perpetrators of extreme violence be reliably identified by the linguistic traces they unintentionally leave behind in their online communications? In closing, she will propose a set of solutions to tackle the spread of violent extremism and to prevent acts of terrorism.

This talk is in person only and is hosted by Edoardo Chidichimo.

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Tue 11 Jun 09:30: Child Development Forum Easter II

Fri, 03/05/2024 - 12:07
Child Development Forum Easter II

Abigail Agyemang (Psychology/Education) – Mathematics Anxiety in Underrepresented Secondary School Children

Irena Tetkovic (Psychiatry) – SIBWELL : Supporting siblings of children and young people with mental health conditions in their wellbeing

Keith Liang (Psychology) – Rhythm in Speech, rhythm in brain, and learning to read in adolescence in East Asia

Child Development Forum are a series of talks bringing together researchers of infant, child and adolescent development across the University of Cambridge.

Talks are termly, and usually held at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Chaucer Road).

Join the mailing list to kept up-to-date, and sign up to give a talk:

https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/ucam-childdevforum

This talk is part of the Child Development Forum (CDF) series.

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Tue 14 May 12:00: Title to be confirmed

Fri, 03/05/2024 - 09:46
Title to be confirmed

Abstract not available

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Thu 23 May 16:00: How innate immune cells adapt to environment and function: diverse tales of mitochondria

Thu, 02/05/2024 - 10:06
How innate immune cells adapt to environment and function: diverse tales of mitochondria

Innate immune cells, such as macrophages and dendritic cells, inhabit all body organs to detect danger and initiate immune responses as well as to maintain organ health. However, the mechanisms facilitating those diverse functions of innate immune cells in distinct tissue milieus are poorly understood.

Recently, we found tissue macrophages to engage their mitochondrial metabolism in an organ-specific manner. Mechanistically, they adapt the activity of their mitochondrial electron transport chain to handle large amounts of environmental lipids in homeostasis. This functional dependence of tissue macrophages on mitochondrial metabolism can be harnessed to ameliorate obesity-related pathologies. On the other hand, innate immune cells have to quickly respond to insults and activate immunity for containment, in particular conventional dendritic cells. We discovered a differential bioenergetic dependence of the immunogenic responsiveness of type 1 versus type 2 dendritic cells (unpublished data). The distinct engagement of mitochondrial metabolism regulates the epigenetic state and functional outputs of dendritic cell subsets and affects their potency to induce anti-cancer immunity.

Overall, my talk will focus on how mitochondria and an active electron transport chain regulate the context-dependent functions of innate immune cells via entirely distinct molecular mechanisms.

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Wed 01 May 15:00: Behavioural Science and Security: Informing Evidence-based Policy and Practice

Tue, 30/04/2024 - 12:29
Behavioural Science and Security: Informing Evidence-based Policy and Practice

This talk will give an overview of how and why risk perception and communication are important by sharing collaborative work, discussing some of the UK systems and Behavioural and Social Science policy advice.

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Mon 15 Jul 12:30: Therapeutic ultrasound for brain therapy

Tue, 30/04/2024 - 11:23
Therapeutic ultrasound for brain therapy

Abstract: TBC

Bio: Dr Sophie Morse is a European Talent Academy Fellow and an Emerging Leader in the Dementia Research Institute at Imperial College. During her PhD, she developed innovative methods to enhance drug delivery to the brain using focused ultrasound and microbubbles. Currently, Dr Morse leads a research group investigating how focused ultrasound can non-invasively stimulate cells in our brain, particularly glial cells and immune cells, to find new ways of treating Alzheimer’s disease, brain tumours and even slow down ageing.

Venue: MRC CBU West Wing Seminar Room and Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82385113580?pwd=RmxIUmphQW9Ud1JBby9nTDQzR0NRdz09

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Mon 08 Jul 12:30: TBC

Tue, 30/04/2024 - 11:11
TBC

Abstract: TBC

Bio: Stefan Haufe is a professor of computer science and head of the UNIML (Uncertainty, Inverse Modeling and Machine Learning) group at the Technical University of Berlin. His research focuses on developing and validating signal processing, inverse modelling and machine-learning techniques for neuroimaging and other medical data.

Venue: MRC CBU West Wing Seminar Room and Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82385113580?pwd=RmxIUmphQW9Ud1JBby9nTDQzR0NRdz09

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Thu 09 May 14:00: Learning and memory in developmental amnesia 

Tue, 30/04/2024 - 08:54
Learning and memory in developmental amnesia 

Abstract not available

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Wed 08 May 12:15: Unifying the mechanisms of the hippocampal and prefrontal cognitive maps

Fri, 26/04/2024 - 12:56
Unifying the mechanisms of the hippocampal and prefrontal cognitive maps

Cognitive maps have emerged as leading candidates, both conceptually and neurally, for explaining how brains seamlessly generalize structured knowledge across apparently different scenarios. Two brain systems are implicated in cognitive mapping: the hippocampal formation and the prefrontal cortex. Neural activity in these brain regions, however, differs during the same task, indicating that the regions have different mechanisms for cognitive mapping. In this talk, we first provide a mechanistic understanding of how the hippocampal and prefrontal systems could build cognitive maps (with the hippocampal mechanism related to transformers and the prefrontal mechanism related to RNNs/SSMs); second, we demonstrate how these two mechanisms explain a wealth of neural data in both brain regions; and lastly, we prove that the two different mechanisms are, in fact, mathematically equivalent.

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Wed 01 May 14:00: Computational Neuroscience Journal Club

Fri, 26/04/2024 - 08:40
Computational Neuroscience Journal Club

Please join us for our Computational Neuroscience journal club on Wednesday 1st May at 2pm UK time in the CBL seminar room

The title is “Feedback Controllability is a Normative Theory of Neural Population Dynamics”, presented by Rui Xia and Youjing Yu.

Summary:

In the production of complex behaviors such as locating, identifying, and grasping food, the brain employs feedback mechanisms, wherein the outputs of a system are rerouted as inputs. Despite substantial evidence supporting feedback control as a normative theory of behavior, if and how feedback control explains neural population dynamics has been largely unarticulated.

In this journal club, we will explore the concept of feedback controllability as a normative theory for understanding neural population dynamics [1]. We will first introduce foundational mathematical concepts of control theory, including controllability, feedback controllers, particularly the Linear Quadratic Regulator. Subsequently, we will discuss the novel dimensionality reduction methods designed to identify subspaces within neural population data that are most feed-forward controllable (FFC) vs. feedback controllable (FBC). Experimental results are then presented to show FBC subspaces as better decoders of behavior and how these two subspaces carry distinct computations with differing regimes of emergent dynamics.

[1] Bouchard, Kristofer, and Ankit Kumar. “Feedback Controllability is a Normative Theory of Neural Population Dynamics.” (2024)

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Mon 29 Apr 16:15: Egocentric and allocentric representations in cortical structures

Sun, 21/04/2024 - 23:40
Egocentric and allocentric representations in cortical structures

Abstract not available

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Wed 01 May 11:30: Perceptual decision-making in autism: From neurochemistry to cognition

Fri, 19/04/2024 - 13:22
Perceptual decision-making in autism: From neurochemistry to cognition

Our brains evaluate sensory information from the environment and use it to guide behaviour. This shapes how we interact with the world and ultimately, our physical and mental well-being. Understanding the mechanisms of perceptual decision-making is of relevance for neurodiverse populations such as autistic individuals. Here I present findings from experimental psychology, computational modelling, and brain imaging (including ultra-high-resolution Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy) that show a) the behavioural similarities and differences between autistic and non-autistic adults during perceptual decision-making, and b) the relationships between neurotransmitters, autistic traits, and perceptual choice in adults. By integrating novel computational modelling approaches with classic task paradigms, this line of research helps bridge the gaps between neurochemistry and cognition and offers new insights into the cognitive neuroscience of autism.

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Cambridge Memory Meeting 2015

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