Jan Drugowitsch

Jan Drugowitsch, Ph.D.

Connecting Brain and Mind through Computational Neuroscience

Every decision and behavior is haunted by uncertainty, introduced by the noisy and ambiguous nature of the world that surrounds us. Despite this, we make such decisions with seeming ease. The goal of the Drugowitsch Lab is to understand the fundamental computations and their neurobiological implementations that allow the nervous system to support such efficient behavior.

By using tools from artificial intelligence and neuroscience research, we approach this goal by developing theories about how the networks of neurons in our brains are able to infer, represent, and process the state of the world, and how this processing leads to decisions we make on a daily basis.

Our current research focuses on decisions based on evidence we directly observe, rather than memorized knowledge. We have previously shown that, in this context, decision-makers are able to trade off the time they contemplate such decisions with their accuracy in a close-to-optimal manner. We are further asking how decision strategies change once these decisions are between options of different intrinsic values, and what might be the computations involved to make up one’s mind about these values. In the close future, we plan on extending our investigations not only to decisions that require taking into account the more complex structure of every-day visual scenes, but also to address behavior of higher dimensions, such as spatial navigation under uncertainty.

Publications View
Nerve injury disrupts temporal processing in the spinal cord dorsal horn through alterations in PV+ interneurons.
Authors: Authors: Rankin G, Chirila AM, Emanuel AJ, Zhang Z, Woolf CJ, Drugowitsch J, Ginty DD.
Cell Rep
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An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning.
Authors: Authors: Lowet AS, Zheng Q, Meng M, Matias S, Drugowitsch J, Uchida N.
bioRxiv
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Causal inference during closed-loop navigation: parsing of self- and object-motion.
Authors: Authors: Noel JP, Bill J, Ding H, Vastola J, DeAngelis GC, Angelaki DE, Drugowitsch J.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
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Competitive integration of time and reward explains value-sensitive foraging decisions and frontal cortex ramping dynamics.
Authors: Authors: Bukwich M, Campbell MG, Zoltowski D, Kingsbury L, Tomov MS, Stern J, Kim HR, Drugowitsch J, Linderman SW, Uchida N.
bioRxiv
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Nerve injury disrupts temporal processing in the spinal cord dorsal horn through alterations in PV + interneurons.
Authors: Authors: Rankin G, Chirila AM, Emanuel AJ, Zhang Z, Woolf CJ, Drugowitsch J, Ginty DD.
bioRxiv
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Bayesian inference in ring attractor networks.
Authors: Authors: Kutschireiter A, Basnak MA, Wilson RI, Drugowitsch J.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
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Diverse effects of gaze direction on heading perception in humans.
Authors: Authors: Gao W, Lin Y, Shen J, Han J, Song X, Lu Y, Zhan H, Li Q, Ge H, Lin Z, Shi W, Drugowitsch J, Tang H, Chen X.
Cereb Cortex
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Causal inference during closed-loop navigation: parsing of self- and object-motion.
Authors: Authors: Noel JP, Bill J, Ding H, Vastola J, DeAngelis GC, Angelaki DE, Drugowitsch J.
bioRxiv
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A large majority of awake hippocampal sharp-wave ripples feature spatial trajectories with momentum.
Authors: Authors: Krause EL, Drugowitsch J.
Neuron
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Interacting with volatile environments stabilizes hidden-state inference and its brain signatures.
Authors: Authors: Weiss A, Chambon V, Lee JK, Drugowitsch J, Wyart V.
Nat Commun
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