Ecological experiments, models and behaviours
Deciding between apples and oranges has been an age-old question not just for hungry shoppers but within the field of decision-making research. However, very rarely have researchers considered the possibility to reject either and move on to the next shelf or even leave the shop altogether. However, to go beyond simple consumer preferences and expand our decision making framework is not just essential for understanding foraging in the wild, but also ecological, real life, behaviour in humans. In general, while some simplifications of decision making in real-life environments are necessary for laboratory settings, past studies have often removed essential complexity. Thus, we want to challenge the common reductionist approach making focuses exclusively on a framing in neuro-economic terms of one-shot decisions and develop new tasks that embrace ecological features in humans and animals alike. On the first day we will be explicitly addressing the possibility of gamification as a tool for more naturalistic task design, followed by an exploration of new tools for ecological data analysis such as hidden Markov models. The second day will be fully committed to exploring ecological or naturalistic task design and what that could mean practical for human and animal task design ang our general understanding of cognition and the underlying neural substrates.
Thursday 21st of March
Morning Session
Gamification, Novel Task design and Task validation
9:30 Intro: Why care about task design and games
10:00 Antoine Coutrot: the long road towards gamification and its benefits using Sea Hero Quest as example
10:30 Discussion: What does Gamification mean for cognition, what are the best methods or it and technical challenges?
11:15 Break: Bring your own Coffee Mug! We have a coffee machine and kettle
11:45 Valerie Godefroy: Monitoring of behavioral symptoms in close-to-real-life and real-life conditions in patients with dementia (and how to use it for clinical applications)
12:15 Discussion: What is the best practice for task characterization, validation and reproducibility for novel tasks
12:45 Discussion: Going Forward
13:00 Lunch: No Lunch provided but you are encouraged to bring your own to eat together at SBRI
Afternoon Session
Hidden Markov models for understanding brain and/or behaviour (half day)
14:00 Intro: Concepts, challenges and potential solutions in general
14:30 Seoming Park: Predicting the unseen: How HMM aid understanding of cognitive processes in the brain
15:00 Romain Ligneul: behavioral segmentation (using moseq)
15:30 Break: Bring your own Coffee Mug! We have a coffee machine and kettle
16:00 James Bonaiuto: Bayesian multilevel HMMs
16:30 Discussion: future use, ideas and challenges for complex and temporally extended brain states, behaviours and cognitions
17:00 Discussion: Going Forward
17:45 Drinks
19:00 Dinner
Friday 22nd of March
Morning Session
Foraging and ecological behaviours (humans)
9:30 Intro: Whys and whats of ecological behaviours
10:00 Jacqueline Scholl: Tasks to measure more clinically relevant ecological behaviours
10:30 Nils Kolling: Ecological task design in humans to understand decision making, learning and motivation
11:00 Discussions: What is important to consider when designing an "ecological task" in humans?
11:30 Break: Bring your own Coffee Mug! We have a coffee machine and kettle
12:00 Jill O'Reilly: Behavioural drives and model updating, a Bayesian perspective
12:40 Discussions: Future frontiers of ecological behaviour in humans
13:00 Lunch: Delivery Pizza at SBRI
Afternoon Session
Foraging and ecological behaviours (animals)
14:00 Jacopo Baldi: Wireless data in freely-moving and interacting monkeys
14:30 Emmanuel Procyk: Exploration circuit dissection using modelling and electrophysiology
15:00 Brea: Bring your own Coffee Mug! We have a coffee machine and kettle
15:30 Charlie Wilson: The ups and downs of motivation
16:00 Suliann Ben Hamed: Pervasive Intrinsic fluctuations in cortical activity: implication for ecological behaviors
16:30 Nadine Ravel: The impact of semi naturalistic housing on male and female Long-Evans rat cognitive functions
17:00 Discussion: ecological behaviour across species, observations in the wild and inspirations for novel cognitive models. Should we consider niches more?
17:30 Discussion: Will designing measures around ecological challenges solve PFC function? challenges of eco design?
17:45 Drinks
19:00 Dinner
Lunch will be available i.e. sponsored by me on the Friday 22nd, but Drinks and Dinner are informal social events where everyone pays for themselves. Lunch for the 21st will not be provided but you are encouraged to bring your own and eat together at SBRI.