UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
          COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                        presents

            "When Good Decisions Go Bad:
  Reinforcement Learning and Computational Psychiatry"

                Prof. Peter Dayan
     (Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit,
         Univervsity College London, UK)

                16 May 2012  (Wednesday)
                      1 - 2 pm + 


              Hatfield, College Lane Campus
             * * * Lecture Theatre E351 * * *

              Everyone is Welcome to Attend

              Refreshments will be available

Abstract.

Substantial efforts across the fields of statistics, operations
research, economics, computer science and control theory have provided
us with a psychologically- and neurobiologically-grounded account of how
humans and other animals learn to predict rewards and punishments, and
choose actions to maximize the former and minimize the latter. It
becomes an obvious idea to try and relate disruptions of these models to
the discontents of decision-making, as seen in neurological and
psychiatric disease. I will describe the current reinforcement learning
model of neural decision making, together with our early attempts to
look at aspects of depression through the lenses of: (a) an infelicitous
prior distribution over decision-making environments which indicates
their lack of controllability; and (b) the failure of a
serotonergically-mediated crutch which normally inhibits potentially
unfortunate choices.


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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk