Patrick Simen

Associate Professor of Neuroscience Patrick Simen was on the Space Cave podcast discussing his research for a general audience. 

Associate Professor of Neuroscience Patrick Simen gave a talk "Evidence for continuous, online adaptation of decision biases, geared toward reward maximization" for the Cognitive Forum series in Michigan State University's Psychology Department.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Patrick Simen spent three weeks in Australia supported by a Powers Travel Grant. There, he visited labs and gave talks at University of Tasmania in Hobart, University of Melbourne, University of New South Wales in Sydney, and University of Newcastle. Simen’s talks focused on the mathematical modeling of perceptual decision making by humans and understanding how the brain incorporates reward information and timing information into simple perceptual decisions.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Patrick Simen’s article “Scale (In)Variance in a Unified Diffusion Model of Decision Making and Timing” was published in Psychological Review. The article was written with student coauthors Ksenia Vlasov '13 and Samantha Papadakis '15.

The article derives behavioral predictions from a simplified mathematical model of neural activity, and it describes the results of human behavioral experiments carried out by students at Oberlin to test these predictions. Most of the predictions held up, suggesting that timing and perceptual decision making depend on a common process in which neural activity builds up over time at a constant rate.

Patrick Simen, assistant professor of neuroscience, recently gave a series of talks in the U.K. and Turkey regarding a mathematical model of neural processing in perceptual decision making and interval timing. In the U.K., Simen spoke at the University of Warwick, the University of Oxford, and the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit of University College London. In Turkey, Simen spoke at Koç University in Istanbul.

Simen's travel was supported by a Powers Travel Grant, the funding from which also gave him an opportunity to spend time with and see the research facilities of his collaborators at the aforementioned institutions.