Chen Institute for Neuroscience Director's Seminar: Adam Kepecs

Please join us for a seminar on Wednesday, January 17 at 4:00PM

Speaker: Dr. Adam Kepecs, Robert J. Terry Professor of Neuroscience, Professor of Psychiatry, Washington School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Title: Neurobiology of Confidence: from statistics to circuits and psychiatry

Abstract: How does the brain gauge trust in its own judgments? Confidence is a pivotal yet enigmatic aspect of cognition, with its misestimation potentially leading to psychiatric disorders and posing challenges in artificial intelligence. I will present an interdisciplinary approach synthesizing statistical models, human behavioral experiments, and rodent neural circuit studies to crack the neurobiology of confidence. We began with a statistical framework to quantify confidence judgments and used it to probe confidence computations in rodents. Contrary to the common assumption that rats have limited cognitive abilities, we found that they actually use statistical confidence to optimize decision-making. We identified key frontal cortical circuits involved in confidence computations through electrophysiology and causal manipulations. By extracting an interpretable neural network model directly from spiking patterns, we replicated how frontal cortex neural populations compute confidence to guide decisions. I will conclude by discussing insights for AI architectures and how this cross-species approach provides traction on the aberrant neural circuits underlying psychiatric illnesses.