Strategy Change

US-German Collaboration on Computational Neuroscience

This NSF award (Award Abstract #1311165) is being co-funded by NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering. A companion project is being funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). This interdisciplinary project is based on the complementary and synergistic expertise of the team members in optimization theory and both theoretical and experimental neuroscience. The ability for strategy change, i.e., the change in action selection and action planning while an overarching goal is maintained is a fundamental, but still barely understood capability of cognitive systems. Sudden transitions are well documented in neurophysiological and cognitive experimental data, but application of the underlying theory of the spatio-temporal neurodynamics is yet to be done. Current physiological and theoretical frameworks of learning focus on incremental learning (as exemplified the reinforcement learning).