Computational accounts of decisions from experience often treat the information contained in new experiences as a disposable product. They are used once to update running evaluations of the available options, but once they have served their purpose they are simply discarded. When taken literal, these accounts imply that people should possess no declarative memory of the experiences that they have made.

A primary challenge for cognitive neuroscience is understanding how the cerebral cortex transforms distinct sources of information into cohesive experiences, and this goal requires knowledge of how functional integration emerges from the cortical structure. I will present recent work describing various features of a principal gradient in cortical connectivity that spans between primary sensory/motor areas and higher-order transmodal association regions.

Decision making under risk is fundamental in humans and other animals. Biologists generally aim at highlighting particular attitudes towards risk (i.e. risk proneness or risk aversion for example) that would reflect naturally selected adaptations to past environmental conditions for a given species. By contrasts with human studies of choice, those studies often fail to consider the interplay between the mechanisms involved in the decision such as the respective role of loss aversion, risk attitudes and probability distortion.

Rencontre avec trois membres de l'équipe organisatrice, Klara Kovarski, docteure en neurosciences cognitives et chercheuse auprès de la Fondation Ophtalmologique Rothschild et de l’Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center, Rocco Mennella, post-doctorant au LNC2  du DEC, et Victor Chung, étudiant au Master de Sciences Cognitives de PSL. 

Comment est né ce colloque ?

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is characterized by progressive cognitive deterioration from early mild cognitive impairment (MCI)) to dementia. The multi-scale causes of such pathologies, from the subcellular to the brain level, remain elusive to experimental approaches alone. The masters project is geared towards developing new models of cell-specific pathologies associated with AD and examining their effects at teh population and functional level. Specifically the models developed will identify AD-linked beta amyloid (Ba) role in neural activity alterations and cognitive impairments.

Jury:

Dr. Cristina SAVIN (New York University), Rapporteur
Dr. Jonathan PILLOW (Princeton University), Rapporteur
Dr. Gianluigi MONGILLO (Institute de la Vision), Examinateur
Dr. Alessandro TORCINI (Université de Cergy-Pontoise), Examinateur
Dr. Sophie DENÈVE (École normale supérieure), Directrice de thèse
Dr. Christian MACHENS (Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown), Co-directeur de thèse

Abstract: