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Patrick McCarthy
DPhil Student
My research aims to characterise mechanisms of learning in the cortex, with a focus on frontal areas involved in higher order cognition. I analyse neural recordings from the brains of mice performing value-guided decision-making tasks to uncover how features such as stimulus identity and value are encoded, and how these representations evolve with learning. Alongside this, I train neural network models to perform decision-making tasks and compare learned representations with experimental data with the aim of using these models to infer the learning rules implemented by neural circuits. I am also interested in developing machine learning tools to produce low-dimensional, interpretable representations of high-dimensional neural data.