Adam Kepecs, Ph.D. 

Professor

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, NY

Every decision we make is accompanied by a sense of confidence about the likely outcome. An accurate sense of confidence confer benefits for a broad range behavior, such as investing more when a gain is more likely. Conversely, the pathological misevaluation of confidence contributes to a wide range of neuropsychiatric conditions, including anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and addiction. I will describe a computational approach to link human and rodent behavior that enabled us to study the neural basis of confidence in rats. Applying similar computational behavioral phenotyping, I will present initial attempts to link variations in human confidence reports to selfreported psychopathology. Finally, I will discuss how a computational approach to behavior can serve as a bridge between animal models to study the neural circuitry of maladaptive behavior and psychopathology in humans.

1. Sanders JI, Hangya B, Kepecs A. Signatures of a Statistical Computation in the Human Sense of Confidence. Neuron. 2016 May 4;90(3):499-506.

2. Kepecs A, Mensh BD. Emotor control: computations underlying bodily resource allocation, emotions, and confidence. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2015 Dec;17(4):391-401.