Trieste Encounters in Cognitive Sciences (TEX) 2025

Session

Guest Talk

Jun 25, 2025, 10:30 AM

Big meeting room, 7th floor (SISSA)

Conveners

Guest Talk: Competing neural races in human frontal cortex shape decision confidence

• Alessandro Toso

Guest Talk: Towards Choice Engineering

• Yonatan Loewenstein

Guest Talk: Representing Durations… From Sensory Data to Magnitude?

• Virginie van Wassenhove

Guest Talk: Inherent Coupling of Perceptual Judgments to Actions in the Mouse Cortex

• Michael Sokoletsky

Guest Talk: Decision, Memory, and Cognitive Representations

• Rava Azeredo da Silveira

Guest Talk: Engagement states in decision-making

• Philippa A. Johnson

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

• Martin Wiener

Guest Talk: Differential Utilization of a Hippocampal Learning Strategy as a Source of Individual Variability and Psychiatric Risk Gene Phenotype

• David Kastner

Guest Talk: From the concept of “cognitive-type” local circuit to the whole-brain mechanism of decision-making

• Xiao-Jing Wang

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

Alessandro Toso

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)

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...

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)

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)

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)

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)

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,...

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

Martin Wiener (Department of Psychology, George Mason University)

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...

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

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

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...

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)

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...