Behavioral flexibility and its neural correlates

Humans and other animals can adapt their behavior to complex and ever-changing environments. They can switch tasks that require different sensory information and quickly learn new tasks without affecting the existing behavioral repertoire. The neural mechanisms that enable this behavioral flexibility are still unclear. Numerous neurons and their connections work in concert to process sensory information and produce appropriate behavioral responses.

Jointly reorganizing them for a new task or context seems daunting and inefficient. Thus, other fast and transient mechanisms must exist that temporarily modulate the way information is processed to support the task at hand. The proposed workshop brings together experimental and theoretical researchers studying flexible and adaptive behavior across different sensory modalities and species.

The goal is to review the most up to date empirical evidence and theoretical ideas of underlying neural mechanisms, identify common themes across approaches and species and thus determine promising future directions for the study of flexible behavior at the neural level.