Researchers at Caltech have come up with a new way of testing one’s theory of mind which is defined as the ability to understand other people’s beliefs, preferences, and intentions as distinct from one’s own. Theory of mind is complex and involves multiple neural processes. The team, which just published their work in Current Biology, found that […]

Caroline Charpentier is a Caltech postdoc working with TCCI®-affiliated faculty member, John O’Doherty. By combining behavioral measures of observational learning with brain imaging, Charpentier is developing computational models (alogorithms) that will help us understand different types of human social behaviors such as interpreting the actions of others, decision-making or resolving uncertainties.   Read more on […]

Doris Tsao mastered facial recognition in the brain. Now she’s looking to determine the neural code for everything we see.   Read more in Nature

Researchers have identified the individual neurons that may underlie our brain’s ability to monitor our behavior, catch and correct the mistakes we make. This work provides rare recordings of individual neurons located deep within the human brain and has implications for psychiatric diseases like obsessive-compulsive disorder.   The work was a collaboration between the laboratories […]

While researching the underpinnings of how insect brains process decision-making, Caltech researcher Floris Van Breugel upended former scientific consensus that fruit flies avoid CO2. Van Breugel works in Michael Dickinson’s Lab at Caltech. Dickinson is an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech.   Read more on Caltech’s website

To provide navigational help for the blind, Caltech researchers have combined augmented reality hardware and computer vision algorithms to create a portable headset that translates the optical world into plain English audio. The work was done in the laboratory of Markus Meister (Ph.D. ’87) who is an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute […]

Caltech researchers have identified a small cluster of neurons in the male Drosophilia fruit fly brain that governs “threat displays,” the aggressive behaviors which are seen in countless organisms preceding conflict. Their work provides a starting point that may lead to greater understanding of threatening behaviors and aggression in humans.   Read more on Caltech’s […]

TCCI®-affiliated faculty member, Sarkis Mazmanian have made an interesting discovery between the microbiome and locomotion in flies. Warm, protected and full of nutrients – the tiny intestines of a fruit fly are a perfect habitat for some bacteria. These bacteria, in turn, help the fly break down and digest food, keeping the insect’s metabolism running […]

If you’ve ever found yourself staring at a lengthy restaurant menu and been completely unable to decide what to order for lunch, you have experienced what psychologists call choice overload. Colin Camerer, Caltech’s Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics and the T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience Leadership Chair has just released new […]

Michael Dickinson, an affiliated faculty member of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech, and two of his colleagues recently discovered that, similar to nautical navigators of old, fruit flies use celestial cues like the sun to navigate in straight lines.   Read more on the Caltech website here.