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X-WR-CALNAME:BCS Interview Day Student Research Presentations
X-WR-TIMEZONE:Eastern Time (US & Canada)
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DTSTAMP:20260614T104749Z
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DTSTART:20230310T210000Z
DTEND:20230310T230000Z
DESCRIPTION:Please join us for a series of research talks from students in 
 the BCS graduate program. \n\nDate/Time: Friday\, March 10th from 4pm - 6p
 m\n\nLocation: On Zoom https://mit.zoom.us/j/95673653804\n\nPresenters:\n\
 n \n\nMahdi Ramadan\, Year 6 Graduate Student in Mehrdad Jazayeri’s Lab\
 n\nTitle: Macaques can reason counterfactually\n\nAbstract: A hallmark of 
 human intelligence is the ability to consider counterfactual explanations 
 for past experiences. It is not known if this capacity is uniquely human o
 r present in other species. Here\, we address this question by analyzing t
 he behavior of rhesus macaques in an intuitive hierarchical decision-makin
 g task. Monkeys saw a ball enter a maze and disappear. While invisible\, t
 he ball moved inside the maze toward one of several possible exits. Monkey
 s received temporal information every time the ball changed direction and 
 had to use this temporal information to infer the correct exit. Comparing 
 behavioral responses to a collection of cognitive models implementing diff
 erent inference algorithms revealed that monkeys improved their decisions 
 by evaluating counterfactuals. This finding was robust to experimental var
 iations including novel maze geometries and perturbation experiments. High
 -density neurophysiology recordings from two brain areas support these fin
 dings. These results trace the roots of counterfactual reasoning to distan
 t points in the primate lineage.\n\n \n\nMitchell Murdock\, Year 6 Graduat
 e Student in Li-Huei Tsai’s Lab\n\nTitle: Frequency-specific vasoactive 
 neuropeptide release regulates glymphatic clearance \n\nAbstract: The glym
 phatic movement of fluid through the brain powerfully clears metabolic was
 te. How neural rhythms regulate glymphatic transport is incompletely resol
 ved. We observed sensory gamma stimulation increases the influx of cerebro
 spinal fluid and the efflux of interstitial fluid in the cortex of a mouse
  model of Alzheimer’s disease\, which was associated with increased aqua
 porin-4 polarization along astrocytic endfeet\, dilated meningeal lymphati
 c vessels\, and amyloid accumulation in cervical lymph nodes. Inhibiting g
 lymphatic clearance via genetic\, pharmacological\, and anatomical interve
 ntions abolished the removal of amyloid by gamma stimulation. Using chemog
 enetic manipulation and a novel genetically encoded sensor for vasoactive 
 intestinal peptide (VIP)\, we found VIP+ interneurons facilitate glymphati
 c clearance during gamma stimulation by regulating arterial pulsations. Ou
 r findings establish novel mechanisms to recruit the glymphatic system to 
 remove brain amyloid.\n\n \n\nSetayesh Radakani\, Year 4 Graduate Student 
 in Rebecca Saxe’s Lab\n\nTitle: What people learn from punishment\n\nAbs
 tract: When a parent or a judge chooses to punish\, they often intend to s
 how that\, and how much\, the punished act was wrong. However\, in light o
 f every act of punishment\, targets and observers evaluate not only the ac
 tion that elicited the punishment\, but also the motives and legitimacy of
  the authority who punished. Both in real life and laboratory settings\, t
 he same punishment can lead to contrasting and even contradictory conseque
 nces in terms of changing others’ beliefs about undesirability of the ac
 t\, as well as the motivations and legitimacy of the authorities. We propo
 se that in order to explain these seemingly discrepant findings\, these tw
 o inferences should not be treated independently. We developed an experime
 ntal paradigm to control and study these inferences simultaneously\, and s
 howed that these two inferences indeed depend\, with exquisite sensitivity
 \, on one another. Further\, we proposed and validated a computational fra
 mework to explain such contrasting inferences parsimoniously\, modeling ob
 servers as making rational joint inferences of wrongness and punisher’s 
 motivation by inverting a Bayesian causal model of how authorities make pu
 nitive decisions. By characterizing how people jointly infer wrongness and
  legitimacy we can begin to illuminate why real world punishment attempts 
 may fail or even backfire. contrasting inferences parsimoniously\, modelin
 g observers as making rational joint inferences of wrongness and punisher
 ’s motivation by inverting a Bayesian causal model of how authorities ma
 ke punitive decisions. By characterizing how people jointly infer wrongnes
 s and legitimacy we can begin to illuminate why real world punishment atte
 mpts may fail or even backfire. \n\n \n\nSara Kornfeld Simpson\, Year 5 Gr
 aduate Student in Mark Bear’s Lab\n\nTalk Title: Identifying and correct
 ing deficits in primary visual cortex activity in Fragile X Syndrome\n\nAb
 stract: Fragile X syndrome (FXS) is the most common known inherited cause 
 of intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Therapeutic
 s for the many devastating symptoms of FXS\, including deficits in sensory
  processing\, remain elusive. Using a mouse model of FXS\, we sought to di
 scover and treat deficits in primary visual cortex (V1) activity that coul
 d be identified from a single-session of passive viewing of stimuli\, with
  the dual aim of identifying a potential biomarker and furthering our unde
 rstanding about how activity of excitatory and inhibitory circuits in V1 a
 re changed during the disease. To interrogate this\, we presented Fmr1-/y 
 mice and control littermates with a set of oriented\, phase reversing grat
 ings that ramped through different temporal frequencies of phase reversals
  ranging from 2-15 Hz\, while recording the local field potential (LFP) in
  V1. Across all temporal frequencies\, there was a deficit in response to 
 the onset of visual stimulation in Fmr1-/y mice. Following stimulus onset\
 , for frequencies ranging from 4-10 Hz\, there was a reduction in the evok
 ed response of Fmr1-/y mice. A deficit in this same theta frequency range 
 was observed when the mice were simply viewing a static gray screen\; this
  deficit\, along with an increase in gamma power (30-85 Hz)\, was present 
 in almost every Fmr1-/y mouse\, suggesting this is a useful biomarker. The
  difference in theta power between genotypes went away when the animals we
 re sitting in the dark\, implicating a deficit in activity of a specific s
 ub-population of inhibitory interneurons which are activated during visual
  stimulation. Of particular interest\, a similar decrease in power in the 
 theta frequency band was observed when measuring EEG in posterior cortex o
 f children with FXS. This suggests a conserved phenotype across species\, 
 underscoring the viability of this as a tool for diagnosis and testing the
 rapeutics.  \n\n \n\nJennifer Hu\, Year 5 Graduate Student in Roger Levy
 ’s Lab\n\nTalk Title: What do language models know about meaning?\n\nAbs
 tract:  Humans communicate not just through the literal meanings of words 
 and sentences\, but through inferential processes that give rise to rich\,
  context-dependent meanings. For example\, listeners interpret speaker utt
 erances by considering the unspoken sentences that the speaker chose not t
 o say\, and even flout literal meanings to interpret ironic or indirect st
 atements. In this talk\, I use artificial neural network language models (
 NLMs) to investigate how humans comprehend language in these flexible\, pr
 agmatic ways. We find that NLMs capture many aspects of pragmatic language
  understanding\, without any language-specific inductive biases or mental 
 state representations. Our results suggest that domain-general prediction 
 mechanisms support pragmatic processing\, illustrating how artificial mode
 ls can yield mechanistic insights into human language comprehension.
LOCATION:
SUMMARY:BCS Interview Day Student Research Presentations
URL;VALUE=URI:https://calendar.mit.edu/event/bcs_interview_day_student_rese
 arch_presentations
CATEGORIES:Conferences/Seminars/Lectures
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