[Seminar] "Saccadic eye movements" Dr. Benoît GIRARD

Dear all,

Neural Computation Unit (Doya Unit) would like to invite you to seminars as follows.

Speaker: Dr. Benoit Girard, ISIR, UPMC/CNRS
http://www.isir.upmc.fr/index.php?op=view_profil&id=109&old=N&lang=en

He has worked on many topics including rat-like robots, reinforcement learning, eye movement control, and basal ganglia modeling. He will present to us what he is up to in three talks:
Monday, December 5, 15:30-17:30
Tuesday, December 6, 10:00-12:00
Wednesday, December 7, 10:00-12:00
*Each will be one to two hours depending on how many questions and discussions there will be.

<Second talk>
Title: Saccadic eye movements

Abstract: The brain saccadic circuitry actively involves regions of the whole brain, from the brainstem oculomotor nuclei up to the cortex. It has been deeply studied in the last 40 years, from many different functional points of view (motor control, movement adaptation, action selection, reinforcement learning, short-term memory, sequence learning, etc.). I will present four complementary computational and theoretical results:

1) at the motor command level: the way the activity of the superior colliculus maps is decoded to generate motor commands may constrain the geometry of this map (Tabareau et al., 2007).

2) at the short-term memory level: eye movement selection during multiple object tracking involves a reduction of uncertainty principle (Colas et al., 2009).

3) at the reinforcement learning level: the cooperation of multiple basal ganglia loops operating at different delays explains shortening of latencies during learning and predicts location vs. identification conflicts (N'Guyen et al., 2014).

4) at the decision making level: the subcortical loops between the superior colliculus and the basal ganglia may be a sufficient neural substrate for leaky competing accumulator processes (Thurat et al., 2015).

Colas, F., Flacher, F., Tanner, T., Bessière, P., & Girard, B. (2009).Bayesian models of eye movement selection with retinotopic maps.Biological Cybernetics, 100(3), 203-214.
N'Guyen, S., Thurat, C., & Girard, B. (2014). Saccade learning with concurrent cortical and subcortical basal ganglia loops. Frontiers in computational neuroscience, 8.
Tabareau, N., Bennequin, D., Berthoz, A., Slotine, J. J., & Girard, B.(2007). Geometry of the superior colliculus mapping and efficient oculomotor computation. Biological Cybernetics, 97(4), 279-292.
Thurat, C., N’Guyen, S., & Girard, B. (2015). Biomimetic race model of the loop between the superior colliculus and the basal ganglia:Subcortical selection of saccade targets. Neural Networks, 67, 54-73.