People suffer from a remarkably long list of cognitive biases—systematic deviations from rational information processing and behavior. Moreover, human behavior is often variable, even when an ideal observer would behave in a deterministic fashion. This talk will focus on biases and variability in the context of decision making when decisions rely on memory. In the first part of the talk, I...
Inter-animal variability is a common aspect of behavior; however, we have limited understanding of its causes. Part of the challenge comes from the difficulty of characterizing the behavior of individual animals. I will present on the way individual rats learn a spatial alternation behavior. We find that lesioning the hippocampus leads to changes in the way rats learn, likely leading to the...
It’s unclear where in the brain perceptual judgments are made and whether this process is independent of any resulting actions. We designed a vibrotactile detection task in which mice flexibly switched between contingencies to dissociate between perception and action. A cortex-wide optogenetic screen revealed that the premotor cortex is important for perception rather than the ability to lick,...
Throughout our lives, we observe, interact with, and immerse ourselves in the external world through sensory perception. Sensory stimuli are perceived in the context of the history of our past sensory percepts and actions. When performing standard tactile discrimination tasks in a lab setting, animals and humans are influenced by the history of the stimuli they receive. In this context, the...
A plethora of work links our perception of time to bodily states. How we move determines when we think things happened, how long they lasted, and when they'll happen again. Separately, movements of the body are intrinsically linked to perceptual decisions across animal species and are evident in human performance. For example, humans and animals exhibit so-called "changes of mind" on decision...
In order to survive, animals constantly face decisions between competing interpretations for noisy and sparse sensory data. In statistics this problem, known as model selection (MS), is typically tackled by balancing a model's goodness-of-fit with a penalty for its complexity. A similar preference for simpler models—a concept known as simplicity bias—has been observed in humans (Gershman &...
Prevailing views of time perception posit that the duration of events, a scalar magnitude, results from the perceptual analysis of sensory data. In a series of behavioral experiments (Lambrechts et al, 2013; Martin et al, 2017) , we showed that when equating task requirements and controlling for evidence accumulation across experimental conditions, duration remains resilient to spatial and...
Cognition critically relies on both working memory (WM) and temporal information. However, how our brain processes temporal information in WM remains largely unresolved. Previous work using a novel n-item delayed duration reproduction task found that durations can be stored as discrete items in WM (Herbst et al., 2025). Herein, participants were presented with sequences of temporal intervals...
Shaping human and animal behavior is both practically and theoretically important. Inspired by engineering’s success in natural sciences, we ask whether quantitative models can outperform qualitative psychological principles in this task, a concept we call “choice engineering”. To test this, we ran a competition where teams designed reward schedules using either quantitative models or...
