Distinguished Speaker Series: Roozbeh Kiani

Dr. Roozbeh Kiani Professor, Neural Science and Psychology, New York University Thursday, October 1, 2026 11:00 AM Mellon Institute: Room 348 Summary: Flexible behavior requires flexible decision-making. We adapt seamlessly to changing environments—adjusting biases, altering decision rules, and inferring hidden task contexts—often without explicit cues. In this talk, I will outline a framework that formalizes different levels of this flexibility and show how these adjustments are implemented in neural codes across the frontoparietal cortex. I will highlight three forms of decision flexibility: (1) Bias adjustments, driven by asymmetric rewards, shift neural activity along the decision variable axis; (2) Rule changes, such as varying sensory weights in a multi-feature discrimination task, produce rotational changes in the population geometry, supporting rapid changes in decision policy; and (3) Hierarchical inference, where animals infer hidden contexts to adapt to task structure, is reflected in the emergence of latent variables represented in distributed subspaces.