DATE: Wed, Jan 28, 2015
TIME: 2:30 pm
PLACE: Council Room (SITE 5-084)
TITLE: Reward Maximization Justifies the Transition from Sensory Selection at Childhood to Sensory Integration at Adulthood
PRESENTER: Maryam S. Mirian
University of Tehran
ABSTRACT:

In a multisensory task, human adults integrate information from different sensory modalities -behaviorally in an optimal Bayesian fashion- while children mostly rely on a single sensor modality for decision making. The reason behind this change of behavior over age and the process behind learning the required statistics for optimal integration are still unclear and have not been justified by the conventional Bayesian modeling. We propose an interactive multisensory learning framework without making any prior assumptions about the sensory models. It suggests that sensory selection and integration are emergent behavior and both are outputs of a single reward maximization process; i.e., the transition is not a pre-programmed phenomenon.