Our lab is participating in this summer’s scientific program of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics on Statistical Learning in the Brain (BrainLearn23). The program is taking place at the University of California, Santa Barbara in California’s golden coast.
The program involves a large group of scientists from multiple disciplines and many locations across the world, all united by the goal of engaging in intense daily scientific programs of presentations, debates, and panel discussions.
The primary topic of the program is on statistical learning in the brain, broadly construed. This involves studies of learning, whether incidental/implicit or through reinforcement by rewards, and it also involves investigations of how the neural code might operate in the brain (e.g. through efficient coding). There are also discussions of perception, development, and how latent variables in the brain’s activity can drive behavior, as well as on the links between learning and memory.
The program is being housed at Kohn Hall, a special building right besides the pacific coast with fantastic ocean views, and with equally fantastic interior facilities for engaging in scientific conversations.
Our lab’s contribution is to engage the community in thinking about all of the above topics but from the perspective of active perception and active sensing. Such a perspective creates new sets of problems and constraints that existing models and theories must consider in order to remain relevant to natural behavior.