The Göttingen Cognition Forum: Curiosity & Interaction

Session

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13 Oct 2025, 10:00

Adam-von-Trott-Saal (Tagungszentrum Alte Mensa)

Conveners

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• Alexander Gail (DPZ)

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• Anne Schacht (Department for Cognition, Emotion and Behavior)

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• Claudia Fichtel (Deutsches Primatenzentrum)

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• Igor Kagan (DPZ)

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• Fred Wolf (CIDBN, MPI-DS, Institute for Dynamics of Complex Systems, Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience,)

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• There are no conveners in this block

5. The Mystery and Significance of Curiosity for Brain and Behavior

Jacqueline Gottlieb (Columbia University)

13/10/2025, 10:00

Oral presentation

Converging evidence suggests that animals are motivated by curiosity, the intrinsic desire to know, but little is known about the mechanisms of this process. I will discuss historical reasons for why curiosity has been neglected in cognitive science, and the crucial importance of this process for higher cognitive functions and ecological behavior beyond the narrow confines of the laboratory. I...

6. Cognitive and neurobiological basis of interactive decisions under uncertainty

Bahador Bahrami (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

13/10/2025, 15:10

Oral presentation

How do people make better—or sometimes worse—decisions when they face uncertainty together? Over the past decade, experimental and theoretical work has begun to map the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie interactive decision-making. I will start by discussing how pairs of individuals may outperform their best member when they share information and confidence. Recent large-scale and...

7. Marmosets - tuned for social interaction

Judith Burkart (University of Zurich)

14/10/2025, 09:00

Oral presentation

Marmosets are highly social monkeys that engage in cooperative breeding. This systematic reliance on allomaternal care entails a set of behavioral affordances that are unique or particularly pronounced in comparison to other primates. I will provide an overview of mechanisms that support these intense social interactions, with a particular focus on behavioral coordination, turn-taking and...

8. Cooperative strategies in marmoset dyads and their neural mechanisms

Steve Chang (Yale University)

14/10/2025, 14:10

Oral presentation

Cooperation in primate species relies on advanced social cognition, but the behavioral and neural mechanisms supporting cooperative behaviors remain unclear. To investigate this, we examined freely moving marmoset dyads in a cooperative lever-pulling task. Marmosets successfully coordinated their actions, relying on social vision rather than environmental cues. Causal dependencies between...

10. Neural codes for natural behaviors in bats

Nachum Ulanovsky (Weizmann Institute of Science)

14/10/2025, 18:30

Oral presentation

We study the neural basis of natural behaviors, in particular navigation and social behaviors – taking a “Natural Neuroscience” approach. In my talk I will discuss three recent studies: (1) Our recent discovery that in social groups, hippocampal neurons encode rich social signals – including the identities, sex, hierarchy, and affiliation of other individuals. (2) A coding-transformation that...

9. Theory of responses to holographic optogenetics in recurrent circuits

Agostina Palmigiano (University College London)

15/10/2025, 10:30

Oral presentation

The cerebral cortex exhibits strong recurrent connectivity governed by complex wiring rules. Recent advances allow probing this circuitry through optogenetic perturbations of single or few neurons, yet a general theory linking these responses to underlying connectivity is lacking. Here, we develop an exactly solvable framework to predict responses to perturbations in networks with multiple...