SCSB Lunch Series: Observational learning in the macaque brain

Date: Friday, September 8, 2023
Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Location: SCSB Conference room 46-6011 + Zoom Meeting (https://mit.zoom.us/j/95884128103)

Speaker: Ruidong Chen, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Simons Postdoctoral Fellow, Mehrdad Jazayeri Laboratory, McGovern Institute, MIT

Talk title: Observational learning in the macaque brain
Abstract: Animals make inferences about latent causes from either their own actions and outcomes (experiential learning) or that of others (observational learning). Do animals discount the experience of others relative to their own, even when facing the same amount of external information? Are the neural substrates of experiential and observational learning shared, overlapping, or independent? To reveal and compare the neural mechanisms for belief updates from self-experience and social observations, we designed a two-player social learning task for both human and non-human primates (NHPs). Two NHPs perform this task with human-like behavior, where both actor and observer accumulate evidence over trials to make choices, with observers discounting evidence from actors relative to their own. I will report preliminary findings from ongoing neurophysiology experiments.