[Colloquium] Thursday 2/21 | Tor Wager at the Computational Social Science Workshop

[Nora Nickels via Colloquium]

THE COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE WORKSHOP PRESENTSTOR D. WAGERDEPARTMENT OF
PSYCHOLOGY AND NEUROSCIENCE AND THE INSTITUTE FOR COGNITIVE SCIENCETHE
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER



The Computational Social Science Workshop
<https://macss.uchicago.edu/content/computation-workshop>at the University
of Chicago cordially invites you to attend this week’s talk:


NEUROIMAGING OF PAIN AND EMOTION: COMPUTATION, REPRESENTATION, AND
REGULATION
<https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/tor_wager/blob/master/Jepma_et_al-2018-Nature_Human_Behaviour.pdf>


Summary: Pain and emotion are central to human life. Their experience
defines our wellbeing, and the brain processes that underlie them drive
behavior and learning. Developing the capacity to influence them, and
sometimes to accept them, motivates human endeavors ranging from spiritual
practices to medical interventions. Developing models of the brain systems
that generate pain and emotion could transform how we understand their
neurophysiological origins, and how we understand interventions ranging
from psychotherapy to self-regulation to drug effects. However, developing
such models will require computational advances, particularly in our
ability to model how emergent properties like pain arise from complex
interactions among brain systems, and how to construct such models so that
they have high neuroscientific interpretability, predictive validity, and
reproducibility. In this talk, I describe a series of studies aimed
addressing these goals. Combining functional neuroimaging with machine
learning techniques, we have developed brain models capable of predicting
the intensity of pain, negative affect, empathy, and autonomic activity in
individual participants, with no prior knowledge about the individual’s
experience. I will show how these models can serve as measures of the brain
processes that generate pain and emotion, and how interrogating the
structure of these models and relationships among them can provide insight
into how the brain represents multiple varieties of affective experience.
And, finally, I will show how these models allow us to compare diverse
interventions on a level playing field, shedding light on how both
cognitive and drug interventions work and how they might be inter-related.


THURSDAY, 2/21/201911:00AM-12:20PMKENT 120


A light lunch will be provided by Noodles, Etc.



Tor Wager is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and a faculty
member in the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of
Colorado, Boulder. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in
cognitive psychology in 2003, and served as an Assistant and Associate
Professor at Columbia University from 2004-2009. Since 2010, he has
directed Boulder’s Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience laboratory. He has
a deep interest in how thinking influences affective experiences, affective
learning, and brain-body communication. His laboratory also focuses on the
development and deployment of analytic methods, and has developed several
publicly available software toolboxes for fMRI analysis.




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The 2018-2019 Computational Social Science Workshop
<https://macss.uchicago.edu/content/computation-workshop>meets Thursdays
from 11 a.m. to 12:20 p.m. in Kent 120. All interested faculty and graduate
students are welcome.

Students in the Masters of Computational Social Science program are
expected to attend and join the discussion by posting a comment on the issues
page  <https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/tor_wager/issues>of
the workshop’s public repository on GitHub.
<https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/tor_wager> Further
instructions are documented in the Computational Social Science
Workshop’s README
on Github. <https://github.com/uchicago-computation-workshop/README>
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