Conférence, Lecture
Distinguished speaker: Richard Ivry
Embodied Decision Making: System interactions in movement execution and action selection
Two well-established literatures have provided elegant computational models of sensorimotor learning and decision making, with relative little connection between the two. I will discuss ways in which we can bring these two worlds together.
In the first part of the talk, I will discuss work that has brought into focus the relevance of multiple learning mechanisms for sensorimotor learning, examining how strategic processes interact with a cerebellar error-based learning system in sensorimotor adaptation. The results here highlight a distinction between error signals that improve action execution or action selection. In the second part, I will turn to learning in decision making tasks, asking how competence in motor execution might be incorporated in models of reinforcement learning. Our work here addresses the question of how an agent determines if the absence of reward reflects a property of the environment or an error in motor execution. We suggest that sensorimotor errors provide a “gating” signal to regulate reinforcement learning, providing a simple solution to this fundamental credit assignment problem.
Bio
Rich Ivry, PhD, is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. Prof. Ivry directs the Cognition and Action lab, using various tools of cognitive neuroscience to explore human performance in healthy and neurologically impaired populations. His research has focused on how people select, prepare, and execute movements. He has a long-standing interest in the cerebellum, seeking to understand how the functions of this subcortical structure contribute not only to skilled movement, but also to higher-level cognition through its interactions with the cerebral cortex. Prof. Ivry is a co-author (with Gazzaniga and Mangun) of Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind, a textbook that has helped trained a generation of cognitive neuroscientists.
A Data Blitz precedes Dr. Ivry’s lecture. It begins at 13:30 and features brief talks by CRBLM student members. Dr. Ivry’s Distinguished Lecture starts at 15:30.