Neurobiological models of decision making can be reduced to a one-dimensional nonlinear diffusion equation

old_uid4573
titleNeurobiological models of decision making can be reduced to a one-dimensional nonlinear diffusion equation
start_date2008/04/10
schedule10h30
onlineno
summaryOne of the main goals of the Neurosciences is to understand the relationships between animal behavior and brain activity. An important step towards accomplishing this goal is to relate models at the behavioral level to models at the level of brain activity. In my talk I will describe an attempt to establish such a relation between behavioral and neurophysiological models of perceptual two-choice reaction time tasks. Reaction times and performance in these tasks have been successfully modeled with one-dimensional diffusion models, while the brain activity has been successfully modeled by two competing populations of recurrently connected neurons. In recent work from our group we have shown that such biologically constrained neuronal network models can be formally reduced to a one dimensional non-linear diffusion equation. Through this reduction it is in principle possible to relate biophysical variables, such as synaptic strength, directly to behavioral measures and thereby to understand the relationships between the two.
responsiblesMarin