T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience Seminar

Please join us for a T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience Seminar on Thursday, November 20 at 3:00PM in Broad 100.

Speaker: Dr. Pavan Ramdya, Associate Professor, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

Title: Object manipulation and affordance learning in flies

Abstract: A central goal shared by neuroscience and robotics is to understand how neural systems autonomously learn to manipulate objects in complex real world environments. Although we broadly understand how visual systems segment objects in natural scenes, how humans and animals learn the affordances or action possibilities of these objects remains largely mysterious. In this talk, I will present our work identifying brain regions causally involved in how the fly, Drosophila melanogaster, learns to manipulate novel spherical objects. Through careful behavioral quantification of a large-scale neural silencing screen, we uncover unexpected roles for multiple brain regions in object manipulation, and propose a mechanism in which intrinsic rewards guide motor policy updates reflecting object affordance learning.