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Spring Semester 2015-2016

For Fall and Spring Semesters 2015-2016, the Behavioral, Computational, and Systems Neuroscience (BCS) Journal Club will meet on Tuesdays from 11:45 to 1:00 pm in Uris Hall 205.

Papers and notes from previous semesters can be found in the BCS meeting archive.

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The Fall 2015 semester's theme is  “Learning within constraints”.  This is intentionally broad, in part because BCS itself has broadened this semester to include behavioral ecology approaches.  Here are some examples of what we have in mind:

  • Learning is constrained, and therefore shaped in form and content, by preexisting memory.  How so?
  • Learning is constrained by species-specific capacities and attunements, sensory or otherwise.  When is this important? 
  • Learning is constrained by modality:  how is learning about space different from, or similar to, learning about nonspatial stimuli?  How is space encoded; how is this similar to and different from other types of information encoding?  This could be a proxy for hippocampus = place codes vs hippocampus = episodic memory wars. 
  • Learning is strongly shaped by ‘educated guesses’ of whether a new stimulus is ‘the same’ as a previous stimulus or not:  the former is based on generalization and leads to the reinforcement learning literature; the latter instead leads one into literatures of competition and interference among conflicting but similar memories.  What do we know about this ongoing process, and is there something to be gained by combining and comparing the reinforcement learning literature with the interference literature?  This essentially statistical process is also the basis for mimicry and its advantages, especially regarding imperfect mimics.  

In order to make discussions more engaging and less formal, we encourage presentations to be primarily "chalk talks", in which concepts are sketched rather than figures shown. Mixed media are OK too, in which a complex figure can be put onto a slide or simply zoomed up on from the PDF file of the original paper, but drawing the figure tends to convey stronger understanding than does flashing a figure up on the wall. We also emphasize that you do not have to present papers in their entirety, much less multiple papers. Having everybody read up thoroughly on something small and focused usually makes for a better experience than everybody skimming one or more full papers. You may want to present only one exciting concept, exemplified by one or more figures drawn from one or more papers. That's great. Focus on the concepts, and don't feel compelled to master every detail of every paper that you want to include in your presentation. Do what you feel is best, but please do not just put the figures of a paper into a slide show and describe the paper.

Presenting your own work is always welcome, in whatever manner you like.

To add yourself to the BCS-L mailing list, send a plain-text email to bcs-L-request@cornell.edu with the body of the message saying simply join. The subject line doesn't matter. Sending the message leave instead will unsubscribe you from the list. See Cornell's Lyris HowTo page for further details.

You can enroll in the BCS Journal Club for graduate or undergraduate credit (1 CR, S/U) as a Topics in Biopsychology seminar: PSYCH 6271. The course requires that you present at least once during the semester and participate actively overall. You are welcome to attend without enrolling, of course, but we do appreciate you enrolling if you plan to attend the whole semester and to present.

Please contact Thomas Cleland or David Smith with any questions.

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2 February 2016:  Organizational Meeting


9 February 2016:  Marissa Rice

16 February 2016:  Feb Break - no meeting.

 

23 February 2016:  Norma Hernandez

1 March 2016:  Open (David gone?)

  • TBA

8 March 2016:  Open (Thom gone?)

  • TBA

15 March 2016:  Joseph

  • TBA

22 March 2016:  Open (Thom gone?)

  • TBA

29 March 2016:  Spring Break - no meeting

 

5 April 2016:  Open

  • TBA

12 April 2016:  Open (Thom gone?)

  • TBA

19 April 2016:  Khena Swallow

  • TBA

26 April 2016:  Open

  • TBA

3 May 2016:  Open

  • TBA

 

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