[lingtalks] Leslie Osborne Talk, Wed. Feb 13 at 12pm

[Steven Ford]

The UCSD Department of Cognitive Science is pleased to announce a talk by

Leslie Osborne Ph.D.

Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, UCSF


Wednesday, February 13, 2008 at 12pm
Cognitive Science Building, room 003

"Insights into neural mechanisms of behavior from analysis of variation".

It is difficult to swing a golf club the same way every stroke, or hit a 
baseball on every swing. Variation in how our brains record what we see, 
and program how we act, creates variability in our behavior. An analysis of 
that variation can reveal more than the overall level of precision in the 
system, it can tell us about the brain's underlying computational 
processing as well. I am studying how sensory estimates are converted into 
actions using pursuit as a model. Pursuit is an eye movement behavior in 
which we track a moving visual target smoothly with our eyes in order to 
stabilize its image on our retinas. By analyzing the fluctuations of neural 
and behavioral responses in the context of a theory of optimal performance 
in pursuit, I am developing a framework for investigating signal processing 
in a sensorimotor system.

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