Ignasi Cos Ph.D.
Ignasi Cos Ph.D.
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Faculty & Department of Mathematics & Computer Science
Institute of Neuroscience & Mathematics UB
Universitat de Barcelona
Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 585
08007 Barcelona,
Catalonia, Spain
E-mail: ignasi.cos at ub.edu
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
My main research interest is on the motor control aspects of decision-making. Specifically, I am devoted to elucidate the brain mechanisms underlying decisions between motor actions, and the principles operating the selection of movement parameters as a function of sensory information, of the structure the motor apparatus and of internal motivation. In neuroscience, one of the most relevant questions is how the brain encodes actions implying different costs and yielding different payoffs, each associated to a different option, to finally decide a movement of specific kinematic and dynamic properties. Understanding how this operates in the brain has both an scholar and a clinical interest, to devise the principles underlying the generation of specific movements, and to provide a more comprehensive understanding of volitional disorders such as Parkinson's Disease. My approach consists of a combination of experimental techniques (Psychophysics and Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) to investigate the manner in which movement is generated under specific experimental conditions and to probe the operation of specific brain areas, and of mathematical techniques (Theoretical Models at different levels of description) to investigate the dynamics of the cortex and the basal ganglia during the process of defining the parameters to elicit specific movements.
This is my CV .
Lab News:
Lab News:
Congratulations to Fanny Fievez for passing her thesis defense!
The next MICIN fellowship has been awarded. On that end, we're recruiting. Multiple positions available at the doctoral and master's level. Please, email me for further information.
Ricardo Moretti just started his visit at UB.
Projects:
Projects:
"Learning to Make Decisions out of Consequence".
Adaptation involves making choices, assessing their consequence, and leveraging this assessment for future decisions. Furthermore, decisions in the animal realm are rarely accompanied by immediate feedback, explicit rewards, or complete knowledge of the environment, which can only be gained via exploration. I am interested in the cognitive mechanisms underlying this kind of decision-making in highly uncertain scenarios, and currently concerned with exploring and formalizing the brain mechanisms involved in this kind of adaptive learning. We designed the Consequential Task to this end, as a laboratory method providing the necessary insight in the behaviour and neural dynamics of their associated neural processes.
"Decision-Making, Motor Control and Confidence".
However, both value-based and sensory decision-making are highly dependent on the motor system, to scan the stimuli to select upon via saccades, and to report the choice after commitment. We are interested in the interaction between the metacognitive processes driving stimuli exploration during the option assessment process, and in formalizing the constraints they impose, by bringing closer current decision-making and motor control theories. Three studies contribute to this. First, to investigate the contribution of the motor system alone on a value-based decision-making task during which participants explored the stimuli, but decided in their absence (look-at-nothing paradigm), revealing a standing relationship between the motor system, confidence and decision-making (Cos I, Senel G, Maldonado PE, Moreno-Bote R (2024) The relationship between confidence and gaze-at-nothing oculomotor dynamics during decision-making). Second, we performed a study in collaboration with the group of Prof. Julie Duqué at UCLouvain to investigate the relationship between the dynamics of motor control and those of decisions between actions. Third, we are in the process of reanalyising the confidence associated to the decisions made during the consequence-based learning process previously described, investigating the contribution of uncertainty to the dynamics of choice themselves.
"The Brain Network Coding of Motor Actions".
The specific contribution of specific cortical areas to the coding of movement and during the process of decisions between actions have been extensively studied. However, most of these charaterizations have been performed on the grounds of single neuron recordings. We were interested on the boundaries of coding by motor cortical brain networks, in a project combining state-of-the-art AI techniques and Local Field Potential (LFP) recordings from nhps by the group of Prof. Numa Dancause at Université de Montréal. In particular, we aim at a formal characterization of the brain network of motor coding as constrained by the neural recordings. Depass M et al. (2022) A machine learning approach to characterize sequential movement-related states in premotor and motor cortices. JNeurophys
"The Influence of Social Motivation on Motor Decisions".
How does the brain relate incentive motivation to behaviour? Do decisions between movements abide by the same principles of motor control? How are these principles altered under Parkinson’s disease (PD)? Indeed, the fact that three of PD’s major motor symptoms: bradykinesia, akinesia and hypokinesia are consistent with a lesser than normal motor invigoration, emphasizes the relationship between motivation and movement. The question remains, whether PD should be reviewed as a disorder of motivation. We propose to investigate this in the context of a unifying model of motivated motor control and decision making, validated by means of an behavioural and electroencephalographic records. This project is in collaboration with Prof. Gustavo Deco at the UPF and Prof. Matthieu Gilson at the Université Aix-Marseille. Preprint of the new paper is available upon request.
Current Lab Personnel:
Current Lab Personnel:
Michael Depass: Doctoral student
Mike's doctoral project formalizes the relationship between the detail of motor and decision-making function implementation across the motor cortices.
Emily Natasha Díaz: Doctoral student (Co-supervision with Simone Balocco)
Emily is driving a Deep Learning methodology for early detection of oropharingeal cancer.
Fanny Fievez: Doctoral student (Primary supervisor: Julie Duque at UCLeuven)
Fanny's project investigated the relationship between motor control and decisions between actions in the context of urgency gating models (defended in March 2024). Congrats Fanny!
Flavia Ferrús: Master Student
Flavia is formalizing a motivation-based model of motor control and decision-making.
Marc Burillo: Undergraduate Student
Marc is quantifying the statistics of Local Field Potentials encoding motor function.
Alba Suades: Undergraduate Student
Alba is investigating the influence of social motivation on the motor control and decisions of PD patients.
Alumni:
Alumni:
Dr. Gloria Cecchini, now postdoctoral fellow at the Roxin Lab at CRM.
Dr. Fanny Fievez.
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