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On Wednesday, 11 am ET

 

Organized by David Hansel, Ran Darshan

& Carl van Vreeswijk (1962-2022) 

About Us

About the Seminar

VVTNS  is a weekly digital seminar on Zoom targeting the theoretical neuroscience community. Created as the World Wide Neuroscience Seminar (WWTNS) in November 2020 and renamed in homage to Carl van Vreeswijk in Memoriam (April 20, 2022), its aim is to be a platform to exchange ideas among theoreticians. Speakers have the occasion to talk about theoretical aspects of their work which cannot be discussed in a setting where the majority of the audience consists of experimentalists. The seminars  are 45 min long followed by a discussion and are held on Wednesdays at 11 am ET. The talks are recorded with authorization of the speaker and are available to everybody on our YouTube channel.

 

To participate in the seminar you need to fill out a registration form after which you will

receive an email telling you how to connect.

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Task structure shapes underlying dynamical systems

that implement computation

The talk will be in two parts. 1) First, I will present published work on multitasking artificial recurrent neural networks that revealed "dynamical motifs". Dynamical motifs are recurring patterns of network activity that implement specific computations through dynamics, such as attractors, decision boundaries and rotations. Motifs are reused across tasks and reflect the modular subtask structure of commonly studied cognitive tasks. We believe this compositional structure to be a feature of most complex cognitive tasks. This work establishes dynamical motifs as a fundamental unit of compositional computation, intermediate between neuron and network. 2) Building on these insights, we are now investigating whether shared dynamical motifs can explain the effectiveness of curriculum learning in animal behavior. Also known as animal shaping, curriculum learning is a training approach where complex tasks are learned in stages through a series of subtasks. Our work provides a novel framework for analysis of neural and behavioral data and has the potential to guide the design of optimal training protocols for both artificial systems and for animals.

Laura Driscoll

Allen Institute

December 4, 2024

Organizers

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David Hansel

I am a theoretical neuroscientist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France and visiting professor at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel. I am mainly interested in the recurrent dynamics in the cortex and 

basal ganglia.

Carl van Vreeswijk *

I am a theoretical neuroscientist working at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France. My main interest is the dynamics of recurrent networks of neurons in the sensory system.

*deceased

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Ran Darshan

 I am a theoretical neuroscientist working at the Faculty of Medicine, the Sagol School of Neuroscience & the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University, Israel. I am interested in learning and dynamics of neural networks. My main goal is to achieve a mechanistic understanding of brain functions.

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©2020 by WWTNS

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