Trieste Encounters in Cognitive Sciences (TEX) 2025

Contribution List

15. Competing neural races in human frontal cortex shape decision confidence

Alessandro Toso

Guest Talk

Decision formation seems to emerge from a competition between populations of neurons encoding the different choice options located in areas of the parietal and frontal cortex. Theoretical insights suggest that this distributed competition may be key for understanding internal states associated with choice behaviour, especially the confidence about decision accuracy. It has previously been...

18. Decision, Memory, and Cognitive Representations

Rava Azeredo da Silveira (University of Basel)

Guest Talk

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...

20. Defining a functional hierarchy of millisecond time: from visual stimulus processing to duration perception

Gianfranco Fortunato (SISSA)

Contributed Talk

In humans, the neural processing of millisecond time is associated with the activation of a wide range of brain areas and involves different types of neural responses. Unimodal tuning to stimulus duration, for example, has been observed in some of these areas but not in others, and its presence is either inconsistently reported or appears redundant along the cortical hierarchy. Moreover, how...

3. Differential Utilization of a Hippocampal Learning Strategy as a Source of Individual Variability and Psychiatric Risk Gene Phenotype

David Kastner (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences University of California, San Francisco San Francisco, CA 94143-0518, USA)

Guest Talk

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...

16. Engagement states in decision-making

Philippa A. Johnson (Leiden University)

Guest Talk

When analysing data from perceptual decision-making experiments, researchers often assume unrealistic stability of decision strategies over trials. However, decision-making behaviour features significant trial-to-trial variability. One contribution to this variability is transitions between discrete, internal engagement states - our attention may wax and wane over the course of minutes and...

17. From the Concept of “Cognitive-Type” Local Circuit to the Whole-Brain Mechanism of Decision-Making

Xiao-Jing Wang (New York University)

Guest Talk

I will first introduce a biologically-based local circuit model of decision-making, diving into its dynamical inner working, cross-level understanding and experimentally testable predictions. Then I will cover recent progress using training recurrent neural network models by machine learning and, finally, connectome-based modeling of distributed decision processes in a multiregional cortex.

4. Inherent Coupling of Perceptual Judgments to Actions in the Mouse Cortex

Michael Sokoletsky (Department of Neurobiology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel)

Guest Talk

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,...

8. Integration of Sensory Evidence With Reward History in Sequential Decision Making in Humans and Rats

Monica Paoletti (Neural Computation Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy and SENSEx Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy)

Contributed Talk

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...

5. Motion in Mind: How Timing and Decision Making Are Linked by Body Movements.

Martin Wiener (Department of Psychology, George Mason University)

Guest Talk

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...

7. Perceptual Compression of Evidence in Intuitive Model Selection

Francesco Guido Rinaldi (International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy)

Contributed Talk

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 &...

9. Perceptual decision making of nonequilibrium fluctuations

A. Aybüke Durmaz (SISSA)

Contributed Talk

A pedestrian deciding when to cross a busy street must consider not only the average traffic flow but also the fluctuations in the movement of individual cars. Similarly, the perceptual system must handle both local fluctuations in individual elements and the global patterns that emerge from their interactions. To investigate how the brain makes efficient decisions in such nonequilibrium...

13. Project 1917: Predictive processing of movie watching

Tiziano Causin (SISSA & CIMeC)

Contributed Talk

When confronted with dynamic and naturalistic visual input, the brain is continuously always trying to predict what’s coming next at different temporal scales and levels of feature complexity. Prediction would require stimulus-related features to be represented before their actual occurrence. This is also reflected in the active decisions that animals make. For example, the position to fixate...

11. Rat classification of visual temporal frequency is affected by the intensity of task-irrelevant auditory stimuli

Mattia Zanzi (SISSA)

Contributed Talk

The brain combines information from multiple sensory modalities to build a consistent representation of the world. The principles by which multimodal stimuli are integrated in cortical hierarchies are well studied, but it is less clear whether and how unimodal inputs systematically shape the processing of signals carried by a different modality. In rodents, for instance, direct connections...

2. Representing Durations... From Sensory Data to Magnitude?

Virginie van Wassenhove (Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, INSERM, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpincenter, 91191 Gif/Yvette, France)

Guest Talk

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...

14. Temporal Sequences in Working Memory

Yunyun Shen (CEA, DRF/Joliot, NeuroSpin; INSERM, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit; CNRS; Université Paris-Saclay, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France.)

Contributed Talk

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...

6. Towards Choice Engineering

Yonatan Loewenstein (The Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel; The Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, Dept. of Cognitive and Brain Sciences and The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel)

Guest Talk

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...

10. Visual-premotor connections in the processing of visual duration

Francesca Bellotti (SISSA)

Contributed Talk

Temporal processing relies on a distributed network of brain regions, with evidence indicating a hierarchical organization in which early sensory areas, such as the primary visual cortex (V1), relay information to higher-order regions like the supplementary motor area (SMA). However, the communication between these areas as well as its directionality and timing remain unclear. This study used...