Neural mechanisms underlying flexible behaviour

When a waiter asks you for money at the end of a meal, how does your brain understand that it is the food you are paying for? Similar relationships are everywhere in the world and understanding them lets our brains choose good behaviours - our brains contain a model of the relationships between objects and events in the world. My research tries to understand how the electrical firing of brain cells could represent something as complex as this world model.  To do this we will create artificial networks of neurons that can learn simple world-models, and compare the activity of these neurons to activity recorded from real brains solving the same problems.  These findings will advance fundamental knowledge about the brain, but will also likely lead to new experimental tools that will be translated to psychiatric studies. The research is also of interest to scientists building artificial intelligence.