On Friday 13 April 2018, DRCMR has the great pleasure to have a visit from Professor Ray Dolan who will give a talk entitled "Building cognitive models of the world."

"Humans exhibit remarkable flexible behaviour. We can choose how to act by exploiting information about what has worked in the past or instead exploit experiences that are only loosely related, including imagining the consequences of entirely novel choices. Such flexible behaviour is thought possible because the brain builds internal models of the world that account for the relationships between our experiences. In this talk, Professor Ray Dolan will consider how we build models of the world from the perspective of learning as well as how we use partial information to construct likely models. He will also highlight novel approaches that we are developing to examine the mechanism by which this is accomplished".

Sine 1999, Professor Ray Dolan has held the Mary Kinross Chair in Neuropsychiatry at the University College London (UCL). In 2006, he became founding Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL. Between 2010 and 2014, he was visiting Einstein Fellow to the Humboldt University in Berlin. Since 2014, he has been Director of a UCL-Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. He hold an honorary Professorship at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and is an External Member of the Max Planck Society. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Academy of Medical Sciences and the Royal Society. 

Among many honnors and awards, Professor Ray Dolan was a Brain Prize winner in 2017 for his research in the brain's reward system and the role of dopamine. 

It is a great honor to have Professor Ray Dolan visiting DRCMR.

The Global Excellence Seminar will be held on Friday 13 April 2018 at 09:30 in the MR Conference Room.