Cognitive Neuroscience Job Candidate Seminar

In this talk, Mobbs discusses novel empirical approaches to mapping the neural circuits, behaviors, and computations associated with ecologically-defined threat states and how these states are steered by the social environment. Mobbs proposes that humans and other animals utilize five core survival strategies that extend from the prediction, prevention, and orientation towards a threat, and assessment of a threat to innate defensive reactions including fight or flight.  These five strategies are further updated by learning systems yet governed by a modulatory system that up- and down-regulates these strategies. Mobbs will discuss spatiotemporal approaches to examining the switch between each of these strategies and new data inspired by economic models from the field of behavioral ecology examining the overt behaviors, computations and neural circuitry associated with escape. Mobbs will then describe how social behaviors and neural circuits have evolved to facilitate survival through group living and social inference.  Mobbs proposes that three core social drives motivate successful group living. These drives include: Mutualism (e.g. mutually beneficial behaviors, such as reciprocal altruism, cooperation and collaboration); Affiliation (e.g. social bonds, allegiance behaviors); and, Status-Seeking (e.g. reputation-enhancement, and the signaling of prestige). With these three drives in mind, Mobbs will present three studies examining the effect of group size on protection, and how inferences associated with competence and reputation help to regulate anxiety and alter cognition.