Fall 2026 Colloquium Series - Friday, October 16
Please join ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ's Institute of Cognitive Science for the Fall 2026 Colloquium Series!
Refreshments Served!
Title: “Contextualizing Flexible Decision-Making Strategiesâ€
Abstract: The world around us is constantly changing in ways that shape the decisions we make, but how do we learn the latent structure of our environment and use it to guide our choices? In this talk, I will present recent evidence showing how humans use latent contextual features to modulate decision-making behavior. Compared with Bayesian inference, human strategies produce systematic biases that are better explained by heuristics favoring information generalization. Using recurrent neural network (RNN) models trained on these behavioral strategies, I will show how neural representations can adapt to learn latent structure. Finally, I will discuss how RNNs, human behavior, and intracranial EEG recordings together can inform our understanding of latent feature inference.
Bio: Tahra Eissa, PhD, is an assistant professor in the Departments of Physiology & Biophysics and Psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine. Her lab focuses on how we learn latent features of the world, how these shape our cognitive strategies, and what happens to these processes in psychiatric disorders. She completed her postdoc at ÂÌñ»»ÆÞ with Dr. Zachary Kilpatrick and her PhD at the University of Chicago.
For questions – please contact Danielle Franklin (Danielle.Franklin-1@colorado.edu)
----------------------------------------
Join Zoom Meeting
Ìý