Neurobiology of Confidence: Statistics, Neurons and Psychiatry

Abstract:
Confidence helps to optimize both routine decisions and momentous ones, yet manifests itself to us as a simple feeling. The inherently subjective nature of confidence has limited investigations by neurobiologists. I will describe an approach that lets us translate psychological questions about subjective confidence into the language of neuroscience. This approach uses a statistical framework for confidence that guides the design of behavioral tasks in rodents and humans and enables quantitative comparison of their behaviors, linking subjective with objective notions of confidence. Then I will describe our results on how rat orbitofrontal cortex mediates confidence-based algorithms to guide behavior. Finally I will discuss how we use computational behavioral phenotyping of confidence to link the neural circuitry underlying maladaptive behavior in rodents to psychopathology in humans.

Location: NRB Auditorium

Date: Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Time: 12:00pm

Host: Dr. Alicia Izquierdo