Tisztelt Kollégák, A jövő héten, 2019. december 9-én hétfőn és 10-én kedden, Peter Dayan két előadást tart Budapesten, egyet a CEU Kognitívtudományi Tanszékén, egyet pedig az MTA KOKI-ban. Az előadások további részletei a levél alján. Minden érdeklődőt szeretettel várunk. Peter Dayan a Royal Society rendes tagja, korábban a University College London Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit tanszékének vezetője, tavaly óta pedig a tübingeni Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics igazgatója. Peter a bayes-i statisztika és a megerősítéses tanulás módszereit alkalmazza az idegtudományban, a kortikális hálózatok és a neuromodulátorok (különösen a dopamin) funkcióinak megértésében ért el alapvető fontosságú eredményeket. Munkáját többek között a Rumlehart Prize-zal (2012) és a Brain Prize-zal (2017) ismerték el. Üdvözlettel, Lengyel Máté és Káli Szabolcs -- Máté Lengyel Senior Research Fellow Department of Cognitive Science Central European University Oktober 6 street 7, Budapest H-1051, Hungary tel: +36 1 887 5142 , fax: +36 1 887 5010 Professor of Computational Neuroscience Computational and Biological Learning Lab Cambridge University Engineering Department Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK tel: +44 (0)1223 748 532, fax: +44 (0)1223 332 662 email: m.lengyel(a)eng.cam.ac.uk web: www.eng.cam.ac.uk/~m.lengyel *** December 9., hétfő, 17:00-18:30 CEU Kognitívtudományi Tanszék Budapest 1051, Okóber 6-a utca 7., 101-es terem (1. emelet) Savouring and its Modulation by Prediction Errors Humans and animals apparently extract intrinsic value from anticipating, or savoring, impending rewards. Further, when these outcomes are uncertain, people typically prefer to know their fate in advance. We link these two phenomena through the suggestion that reward prediction errors occasioned by the revelation can boost the level of savoring. The result is a behavioural anomaly that has consequences for maladaptivity such as gambling. We formalize this proposal, and investigate its neurobiology in humans using fMRI. In a task involving delayed probabilistic rewards, we found that participants had a greater preference for advance information for greater delays and lower probabilities, consistent with the boosting hypothesis. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) encoded the time-varying anticipatory value signal predicted by the behavioral model. Reward prediction errors, encoded in dopaminergic midbrain, were coupled to vmPFC via hippocampus. We suggest that boosting might be driven by enhanced hippocampus-based imagination of future outcomes. This is joint work with Kyo Iigaya, Tobias Hauser, Zeb Kurth-Nelson, John O'Doherty and Ray Dolan. *** December 10., kedd, 11:00-12:00 MTA Kísérleti Orvostudományi Kutatóintézet Budapest 1083, Szigony u. 43. Pavlovian-Instrumental Interactions in Active Avoidance Active avoidance is a behavioural neuroscience paradigm that is replete with psychological and neural enigmas. It has therefore attracted substantial computational interest. We built a model of a recent experiment by Gentry, Lee, and Roesch (’Phasic dopamine release in the rat nucleus accumbens predicts approach and avoidance performance’, Nat. Commun., 7:13154) which shows phasic dopamine concentrations in the nucleus accumbens core of rats whilst they avoided shocks, acquired food, or acted to gain no programmed outcome. These last, neutral, trials turned out to be a perfect probe for the workings of avoidance, partly because of the substantial differences between subjects and sessions revealed in the experiment. We suggest a way to interpret this probe, gaining support for opponency-, safety-, and Pavlovian-influenced treatments of avoidance.