STATISTICS COLLOQUIUM

Thursday, December 1st, 2011 at 4.10pm, MSB 1147 (Colloquium Room)
Refreshments: 3.30pm, MSB 4110 (Statistics Lounge)

Speaker:  Anne Smith (Dept Anesthesiology & Pain Medicine, UC Davis)

Title: Statistics for understanding learning in neurophysiological experiments

Abstract: Understanding how learning occurs is important from a basic science standpoint and also to allow better understanding of states where learning is impaired.Analyzing neural data from experiments designed to understand learning can be challenging because of the large number of observations as well as the underlying inherent nonlinear dynamics.In this talk I will present approaches to analyzing learning from both behavioral and neural spike data in animals as they perform learning experiments.In particular I will focus first on how the state-space approach can be used to track changes in behavior during an experiment, and second on how set probability methods can be applied to assess higher-order network observations in neural spike data.