The contributions of the basal ganglia to reward-biased perceptual decisions

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Long Ding, Ph.D., Research Associate Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania

Long Ding received her BS in Telecommunications from Xidian University in Xi’an, China. Inspired by lectures on classic studies of the pupil reflex and ion channels, where engineering and mathematical concepts led to insightful inferences about how the brain works, she switched fields and went on to obtain a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been fascinated by the basal ganglia and looked at their functions through many lenses, including characteristics of resting tremor in Parkinson’s Disease patients, dopaminergic actions that may support vocal learning in songbirds, reward modulated saccade behaviors in monkeys, and neural computations supporting decision making in monkeys. She joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and is now a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience. Her current research focuses on the computational roles of individual basal ganglia nuclei in decision processes that incorporate noisy visual information and reward contexts.

ABOUT THE NEURO-COE SEMINAR SERIES

The Columbia/AFRL Center of Excellence on the Neuroscience of Decision Making (Neuro-COE) represents a multidisciplinary, multimodal, and multiscale effort for elucidating the neural mechanisms of decision-making, especially under stress, time pressure, and fatigue. It represents a collaboration between biomedical engineers, neuroscientists, computer scientists, and psychologists, both at Columbia University and the Air Force Research Laboratory. Join the Directors Paul Sajda and Qi Wang as we hear from experts in the field and learn from their insights.