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Banbury Center Workshop Series

Neurocomputational Strategies: From Synapses to Behavior (1998)
Functional Organization of the Thalamus and Cortex and their Interactions (1999)
Toward Animal Models of Attention and Consciousness (2000)
Persistent Neural Activity (2000)
Can a Machine Be Conscious? (2001)
Communication in Brain Systems (2004)
Neurobiology of Decision-Making (2005)
Computational Approaches to Cortical Functions (2006)
New Frontiers in Studies of Nonconscious Processing (2007)
Theoretical and Experimental Approaches to Auditory and Visual Attention (2008)
Searching for Principles Underlying Memory in Biological Systems (2009)
Neuronal Response Variability and Cortical Computation (2011)
Connections and Communication in the Brain (2014)

Peter Dayan (invited speaker)

Computational neuromodulation

Gatsby Institute

Physiological, pharmacological and behavioral evidence suggests that the neuromodulators dopamine and acetylcholine are playing specific computational roles in classical and operant conditioning in rats and monkeys. The phasic activity of dopaminergic cells in the ventral tegmental area and substantia nigra appears to report errors in the predictions of future reward; cholinergic projections to the cortex and hippocampus appear to mediate attentional competition between possibly predictive stimuli. In this talk, I will review the computational framework of reinforcement learning that has been used to model this evidence, and discuss some of the shortcomings and resulting extensions of this framework.