Current Research Interests
The environment most brain systems of humans and animals are constantly confronted with is complex and continuously changing, with each time step updating a potentially bewildering set of opportunities and demands for action. Far from the controlled, discrete trials used in most investigations into action behaviors and the decisions that drive them, behavior outside the lab is a seamless and continuous process of monitoring ongoing action, and of evaluating persistence in the current activity with respect to opportunities to switch tasks as alternatives become available. The intense constraints on biological systems often forces a pragmatic solution for online sensorimotor behavior given continuous sensory inputs and prior knowledge, resulting in a functional pleomorphism of the cortical-subcortical loops involved, where a given area of the brain performs different functional computations in different circumstances or times. For example, the same parietal neurons may, at one timepoint, represent the set of possible current actions and at another timepoint, represent a cumulative, winner-take-all population level decision of one particular action from that set. My study aims to detect how competition for different actions are represented and resolved in the brain and how ongoing decision behavior is modulated by various kinds of feedback mechanisms. Specifically, a choice task was designed to test several hypotheses: what sets of control decisions frontopolar cortex may carry out (what to do?), how different choice opportunities offered by the environment with respect to spatial information (where to do it?) versus effector information (how to do it?) are represented and resolved in the brain.
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