Modeling the social brain

Thursday, December 10, 2020 – 4:00 – 5:00 pm

Online

Dr. Xiaosi Gu, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Department of Neuroscience, Director of the Computational Psychiatry Unit, Friedman Brain Institute & Addiction Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

What?

This presentation describes our recent work demonstrating how the brain computes norms and social controllability. Leveraging recent advances in decision neuroscience, our social models address questions related to how we form beliefs about social norms and how we use model-based planning to influence others and estimate the controllability of our social interactions.

Why?

Computational modeling approaches can break down a seemingly subjective and complex mental process (e.g. such as our beliefs about people) into detailed cognitive components. Furthermore, you can create simulations as well as make predictions about how people might behave, given a set of defined parameters.

How?

Prerequisites include a good understanding of the decision neuroscience and cognitive modeling literature, and some basic programming skills in Matlab, R, or Stan. We are glad to openly share anonymized data and codes. Feel free to contact us at: xiaosi.gu@mssm.edu
Reference publications: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/737353v2.full; https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25589742/
Computational Psychiatry Unit at Mount Sinai: https://www.neurocpu.org/
Computational Psychiatry Summer Course: www.cpcourse.org
Computational Psychiatry Journal: http://computationalpsychiatry.org/

Registration Information

You must subscribe to the Workshop series using your email to receive Zoom information for the virtual workshop: https://medicine.yale.edu/psychiatry/map/