Seminar Speaker: Payam Piray, PhD. from the Department of Psychology

Processing uncertainty is critical for adaptive learning and decision making and maladaptive processes of uncertainty are linked to cognitive dysfunctions in anxiety disorders. However, it is not clear what specific computations support this ambiguous notion of uncertainty, how they go wrong, and how these same computational constructs are impaired in various brain disorders. I will present a model for computing uncertainty that disentangles different sources of uncertainty and use the model to simulate human and animal data across seemingly disparate neural and behavioral phenomena. I will also show how this framework allows us to understand pathological learning in anxious individuals.