Physics Colloquium: Christine Constantinople

The Syracuse University Physics Department is pleased to welcome Dr. Christine Constantinople, Assistant Professor, Center for Neural Science at New York University.

Christine graduated from New York University with a B.S. in Neural Science in 2008, and earned her PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior in Randy Bruno’s lab at Columbia University in 2013.  She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute with David Tank and Carlos Brody. She joined NYU as an Assistant Professor in the Center for Neural Science in January 2019.

Abstract:

“Neural mechanisms of inference”

How do neural systems make inferences about the underlying statistics of environments, and use those inferences for behavior? Dr. Constantinople will describe the ongoing efforts to delineate the multi-regional circuit mechanisms that support inference in the brain. We have developed a novel temporal wagering task with latent structure, and used high-throughput behavioral training to obtain well-powered behavioral datasets from hundreds of rats that have learned the structure of the task. Inactivating the lateral orbitofrontal cortex (lOFC) impairs rats’ ability to infer the hidden state of the task, and behavioral modeling suggests that rats specifically are less effective at updating their subjective beliefs based on outcomes when lOFC is inactivated, but other aspects of the decision-making process are intact. Electrophysiological recordings from lOFC reveal encoding of subjective beliefs about hidden states (i.e., posterior probabilities) at the level of single cells and populations of neurons. These data suggest that lOFC represents and updates subjective beliefs for inferring partially observable states of the environment.