Where are you Moving? Assessing Precision, Accuracy, and Temporal Dynamics in Multisensory Heading Perception Using Continuous Psychophysics
Visuomotor learning of location, action, and prediction
The Mirror Mechanism
Anticipating behaviour through working memory (BACN Early Career Prize Lecture 2023)
Working memory is about the past but for the future. Adopting such a future-focused perspective shifts the narrative of working memory as a limited-capacity storage system to working memory as an anticipatory buffer that helps us prepare for potential and sequential upcoming behaviour. In my talk, I will present a series of our recent studies that have started to reveal emerging principles of a working memory that looks forward – highlighting, amongst others, how selective attention plays a vital role in prioritising internal contents for behaviour, and the bi-directional links between visual working memory and action. These studies show how studying the dynamics of working memory, selective attention, and action together paves way for an integrated understanding of how mind serves behaviour.
Vision for Real-Time Interactions with Objects and People
How what you do shapes what you see
Neural circuits for vision in the natural world
Human see, human do? Tool use representations during picture viewing, pantomiming and real grasping
Shaping activity in visual cortex through voluntary actions
Food, taste, and the role of the cortical laminar in action and imagination
Can I be bothered? Neural and computational mechanisms underlying the dynamics of effort processing (BACN Early-career Prize Lecture 2021)
From a workout at the gym to helping a colleague with their work, everyday we make decisions about whether we are willing to exert effort to obtain some sort of benefit. Increases in how effortful actions and cognitive processes are perceived to be has been linked to clinically severe impairments to motivation, such as apathy and fatigue, across many neurological and psychiatric conditions. However, the vast majority of neuroscience research has focused on understanding the benefits for acting, the rewards, and not on the effort required. As a result, the computational and neural mechanisms underlying how effort is processed are poorly understood. How do we compute how effortful we perceive a task to be? How does this feed into our motivation and decisions of whether to act? How are such computations implemented in the brain? and how do they change in different environments? I will present a series of studies examining these questions using novel behavioural tasks, computational modelling, fMRI, pharmacological manipulations, and testing in a range of different populations. These studies highlight how the brain represents the costs of exerting effort, and the dynamic processes underlying how our sensitivity to effort changes as a function of our goals, traits, and socio-cognitive processes. This work provides new computational frameworks for understanding and examining impaired motivation across psychiatric and neurological conditions, as well as why all of us, sometimes, can’t be bothered.
Rhythms in perception: action planning and behavioral oscillations
Plasticity and learning in multisensory perception for action
Experience-independent brain development in perception and action systems
Extracting heading and goal through structured action
Many flexible behaviors are thought to rely on internal representations of an animal’s spatial relationship to its environment and of the consequences of its actions in that environment. While such representations—e.g. of head direction and value—have been extensively studied, how they are combined to guide behavior is not well understood. I will discuss how we are exploring these questions using a classical visual learning paradigm for the fly. I’ll begin by describing a simple policy that, when tethered to an internal representation of heading, captures structured behavioral variability in this task. I’ll describe how ambiguities in the fly’s visual surroundings affect its perception and, when coupled to this policy, manifest in predictable changes in behavior. Informed by newly-released connectomic data, I’ll then discuss how these computations might be carried out and combined within specific circuits in the fly’s central brain, and how perception and action might interact to shape individual differences in learning performance.
Connectivity and computation in the cerebral cortex
Neuroscientists believe that perception, action and cognition arise from brain’s activity. A major challenge in neuroscience is to understand how brain’s complex circuits give rise to activity patterns that support these different functions. I will discuss different ways of mapping neural circuits in the brain, and how we can relate the structure of neural circuits to the computations that take place within them, with an emphasis on the visual system.