John Michael Pearson

Duke University | DU · Biostatistics and Bioinformatics

Learning skilled behaviors requires intensive practice over days, months, or years. Behavioral hallmarks of practice include exploratory variation and long-term improvements, both of which can be impacted by circadian processes. During weeks of vocal practice, the juvenile male zebra finch transforms highly variable and simple song into a stable an...

Musical and athletic skills are learned and maintained through intensive practice to enable precise and reliable performance for an audience. Consequently, understanding such complex behaviours requires insight into how the brain functions during both practice and performance. Male zebra finches learn to produce courtship songs that are more varied...

Jury decisions are among the most consequential social decisions in which bias plays a notable role. While courts take a number of measures to reduce the influence of bias on decisions about case strength or deserved punishment based on evidence introduced during a trial, jurors may still incorporate personal biases based on knowledge, experience,...

Random variables and their distributions are a central part in many areas of statistical methods. The Distributions.jl package provides Julia users and developers tools for working with probability distributions, leveraging Julia features for their intuitive and flexible manipulation, while remaining highly efficient through zero-cost abstractions.

Increases in the scale and complexity of behavioral data pose an increasing challenge for data analysis. A common strategy involves replacing entire behaviors with small numbers of handpicked, domain-specific features, but this approach suffers from several crucial limitations. For example, handpicked features may miss important dimensions of varia...

While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) remains one of the most widespread and important methods in basic and clinical neuroscience, the data it produces-time series of brain volumes-continue to pose daunting analysis challenges. The current standard ("mass univariate") approach involves constructing a matrix of task regressors, fitting...

Animals vocalize only in certain behavioral contexts, but the circuits and synapses through which forebrain neurons trigger or suppress vocalization remain unknown. Here we used transsynaptic tracing to identify two populations of inhibitory neurons that lie upstream of neurons in the periaqueductal gray that gate the production of ultrasonic vocal...

Animals vocalize only in certain behavioral contexts, but the circuits and synapses through which forebrain neurons trigger or suppress vocalization remain unknown. Here we used transsynaptic tracing to identify two populations of inhibitory neurons that lie upstream of neurons in the periaqueductal gray that gate the production of ultrasonic vocal...

A bstract Vocalization is an essential medium for social and sexual signaling in most birds and mammals. Consequently, the analysis of vocal behavior is of great interest to fields such as neuroscience and linguistics. A standard approach to analyzing vocalization involves segmenting the sound stream into discrete vocal elements, calculating a numb...

Questions of social behavior are simultaneously among the most fundamental in neuroscience and the most challenging in artificial intelligence. Yet despite decades of work, a unified perspective from the cognitive and computational approaches to the problem has yet to emerge. Recently, however, excitement around the challenges posed to reinforcemen...

Random variables and their distributions are a central part in many areas of statistical methods. The Distributions.jl package provides Julia users and developers tools for working with probability distributions, leveraging Julia features for their intuitive and flexible manipulation, while remaining highly efficient through zero-cost abstractions.

Previous studies of strategic social interaction in game theory have predominantly used games with clearly-defined turns and limited choices. Yet, most real-world social behaviors involve dynamic, coevolving decisions by interacting agents, which poses challenges for creating tractable models of behavior. Here, using a game in which humans competed...

Understanding the principles by which agents interact with both complex environments and each other is a key goal of decision neuroscience. However, most previous studies have used experimental paradigms in which choices are discrete (and few), play is static, and optimal solutions are known. Yet in natural environments, interactions between agents...

Without regularization, goals far exceed game area. A: Difference between actual and predicted control derivatives for the same trial analyzed in the Model comparison section. B: Predicted goal states in all three observed dimensions. C: At 0.5s, both players’ energy functions (blue, shooter; red, goalie) based on this model are far off the game ar...

Generated trials matched with actual trials. For 30 random trajectories generated by our model, we located and plotted the closest 20 trials (in mean-squared state space error) in the training data set. The generated trajectories are in black and the matched ones are in blue (the most similar one in orange). (TIF)

Single trial animation. Animation of a real single trial played by two subjects, the same trial with goals overlaid, and a third presentation of the same trial with energy function overlaid as a heat map. (MP4)

Single trial animation. (MP4)

Model comparison: Trial completion. For 10 random trials in the validation data set, we completed trajectories (n = 100) using the proposed model, the single Gaussian model, and the linear model. The actual trajectories are in black, and the completed ones are in blue. Only trials that last less than 256s are displayed except the single Gaussian mo...

Single trial animation. (MP4)

Single trial animation. (MP4)

Concerns over wrongful convictions have spurred an increased focus on understanding criminal justice decision-making. This study describes an experimental approach that complements conventional mock-juror experiments and case studies by providing a rapid, high-throughput screen for identifying preconceptions and biases that can influence how jurors...

How the brain processes parallel streams of information has been widely researched, yet remains unsolved. A new study shows that the brain processes informative cues in serial even when they are presented simultaneously, and that patterns of cortical activity shift under the constraints of rapid decisions to optimize processing.

The striatum supports learning from immediate feedback by coding prediction errors (PEs), whereas the hippocampus (HC) plays a parallel role in learning from delayed feedback. Both regions show evidence of decline in human aging, but behavioral research suggests greater decline in HC versus striatal functions. The present study included male and fe...

Previous approaches to investigating strategic social interaction in game theory have predominantly used games with clearly-defined turns and limited choices. However, most real-world social behaviors involve dynamic, coevolving decisions by interacting agents, which pose challenges for creating tractable models of behavior. Here, using a competiti...

Wearable eye-trackers offer exciting advantages over screen-based systems, but their use in research settings has been hindered by significant analytic challenges as well as a lack of published performance measures among competing devices on the market. In this article, we address both of these limitations. We describe (and make freely available) a...

The ability to adaptively minimize not only motor but cognitive symptoms of neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's Disease (PD) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), is a primary goal of next-generation deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices. On the basis of studies demonstrating a link between beta-band synchronization and severity of motor s...

Experiments that study neural encoding of stimuli at the level of individual neurons typically choose a small set of features present in the world-contrast and luminance for vision, pitch and intensity for sound-and assemble a stimulus set that systematically varies along these dimensions. Subsequent analysis of neural responses to these stimuli ty...

Inferred latents as classification features. (PDF)

Effects of bin size and dynamics. (PDF)

Mathematical details. Derivation of ELBO and Inference. (PDF)

We address the problem of designing artificial agents capable of reproducing human behavior in a competitive game involving dynamic control. Given data consisting of multiple realizations of inputs generated by pairs of interacting players, we model each agent's actions as governed by a time-varying latent goal state coupled to a control model. The...

What we are currently thinking influences where we attend. The finding that active maintenance of visual items in working memory (WM) biases attention toward memory-matching objects—even when WM content is irrelevant for attentional goals—suggests a tight link between WM and attention. To test whether this link is reliable enough to infer specific...

Human altruism is often expressed through charitable donation—supporting a cause that benefits others in society, at cost to oneself. The underlying mechanisms of this other-regarding behavior remain imperfectly understood. By recording event-related-potential (ERP) measures of brain activity from human participants during a social gambling task, w...

Significance Making social decisions requires evaluation of benefits and costs to self and others. Long associated with emotion and vigilance, neurons in primate amygdala also signal reward and punishment as well as information about the faces and eyes of others. Here we show that neurons in the basolateral amygdala signal the value of rewards for...

Experiments that study neural encoding of stimuli at the level of individual neurons typically choose a small set of features present in the world --- contrast and luminance for vision, pitch and intensity for sound --- and assemble a stimulus set that systematically (and preferably exhaustively) varies along these dimensions. Neuronal responses in...

Sophisticated machine learning algorithms have been successfully applied to functional neuroimaging data in order to characterize internal cognitive states. But is it possible to “mind-read” without the scanner? Capitalizing on the robust finding that the contents of working memory guide visual attention toward memory-matching objects, we trained a...

Why do people gamble? Conventional views hold that gambling may be motivated by irrational beliefs, risk-seeking, impulsive temperament, or dysfunction within the same reward circuitry affected by drugs of abuse. An alternate, unexplored perspective is that gambling is an extension of natural foraging behavior to a financial environment. However, w...

The adaptive trade-off between exploration and exploitation is a key component in models of reinforcement learning. Over the past decade, these models have been applied to the study of reward-seeking behavior. Drugs of addiction induce reward-seeking behavior and modify its underlying neurophysiological processes. These neurophysiological changes m...

In social environments, decisions not only determine rewards for oneself but also for others. However, individual differences in pro-social behaviors have been typically studied through self-report. We developed a decision-making paradigm in which participants chose from card decks with differing rewards for themselves and charity; some decks gave...

Neuroeconomics applies models from economics and psychology to inform neurobiological studies of choice. This approach has revealed neural signatures of concepts like value, risk, and ambiguity, which are known to influence decision making. Such observations have led theorists to hypothesize a single, unified decision process that mediates choice b...

Complex natural environments favor the dynamic alignment of neural processing between goal-relevant stimuli and conflicting but biologically salient stimuli like social competitors or predators. The biological mechanisms that regulate dynamic changes in vigilance have not been fully elucidated. Arousal systems that ready the body to respond adaptiv...

There was an error published in J. Exp. Biol. 216, 3035-3046. The authors inadvertently omitted to declare a competing interest for one of the authors. The correct Competing Interests statement is given below. J.S.B. owns the company (Positive Science) that manufactured the eye-tracking headpiece and designed the eye-tracking software, which were u...

We investigated the precision of the approximate number system (ANS) in three lemur species (Lemur catta, Eulemur mongoz, and Eulemur macaco flavifrons), one Old World monkey species (Macaca mulatta) and humans (Homo sapiens). In Experiment 1, four individuals of each nonhuman primate species were trained to select the numerically larger of two vis...

As studies of the neural circuits underlying choice expand to include more complicated behaviors, analysis of behaviors elicited in laboratory paradigms has grown increasingly difficult. Social behaviors present a particular challenge, since inter- and intra-individual variation are expected to play key roles. However, due to limitations on data co...

Dopamine neurons are well known for signaling reward-prediction errors. In this issue, Matsumoto and Takada (2013) show that some dopamine neurons also signal salient events during progression through a visual search task requiring working memory and sustained attention.

Significance Psychologists often measure impulsivity and self-control in animals using the intertemporal choice task. This task pits a delayed reward against an immediate smaller one and is repeated several times. To ensure that animals do not choose the immediate reward to progress to the next trial more quickly, an adjusting postreward buffer is...

Conspicuous, multicomponent ornamentation in male animals can be favored by female mate choice but we know little about the cognitive processes females use to evaluate these traits. Sexual selection may favor attention mechanisms allowing the choosing females to selectively and efficiently acquire relevant information from complex male display trai...

A neuroethological approach to human and nonhuman primate behavior and cognition predicts biological specializations for social life. Evidence reviewed here indicates that ancestral mechanisms are often duplicated, repurposed, and differentially regulated to support social behavior. Focusing on recent research from nonhuman primates, we describe ho...

Success in many decision-making scenarios depends on the ability to maximize gains and minimize losses. Even if an agent knows which cues lead to gains and which lead to losses, that agent could still make choices yielding suboptimal rewards. Here, by analyzing event-related potentials (ERPs) recorded in humans during a probabilistic gambling task,...

Foundational studies in decision making focused on behavior as the most accessible and reliable data on which to build theories of choice. More recent work, however, has incorporated neural data to provide insights unavailable from behavior alone. Among other contributions, these studies have validated reinforcement learning models by demonstrating...

Advantageous decision-making is an adaptive trade-off between exploring alternatives and exploiting the most rewarding option. This trade-off may be related to maladaptive decision-making associated with nicotine dependence; however, explore/exploit behavior has not been previously investigated in the context of addiction. The explore/exploit trade...

A multidisciplinary examination of cognitive mechanisms, shaped over evolutionary time through natural selection, that govern decision making. How do we make decisions? Conventional decision theory tells us only which behavioral choices we ought to make if we follow certain axioms. In real life, however, our choices are governed by cognitive mechan...

How do we make decisions? A study uses MEG to provide the spatial as well as the temporal resolution needed to answer this question, together with computational modeling, which allows for complex non-linear decision models. This work helps resolve some of the seemingly contradictory results from previous work.

Deciding when to leave a depleting resource to exploit another is a fundamental problem for all decision makers. The neuronal mechanisms mediating patch-leaving decisions remain unknown. We found that neurons in primate (Macaca mulatta) dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, an area that is linked to reward monitoring and executive control, encode a dec...

In attentional models of learning, associations between actions and subsequent rewards are stronger when outcomes are surprising, regardless of their valence. Despite the behavioral evidence that surprising outcomes drive learning, neural correlates of unsigned reward prediction errors remain elusive. Here we show that in a probabilistic choice tas...

When has the world changed enough to warrant a new approach? The answer depends on current needs, behavioral flexibility and prior knowledge about the environment. Formal approaches solve the problem by integrating the recent history of rewards, errors, uncertainty and context via Bayesian inference to detect changes in the world and alter behavior...

Animals are notoriously impulsive in common laboratory experiments, preferring smaller, sooner rewards to larger, delayed rewards even when this reduces average reward rates. By contrast, the same animals often engage in natural behaviors that require extreme patience, such as food caching, stalking prey, and traveling long distances to high-qualit...

In most natural decision contexts, the process of selecting among competing actions takes place in the presence of informative, but potentially ambiguous, stimuli. Decisions about magnitudes - quantities like time, length, and brightness that are linearly ordered - constitute an important subclass of such decisions. It has long been known that perc...

In dynamic environments, adaptive behavior requires striking a balance between harvesting currently available rewards (exploitation) and gathering information about alternative options (exploration). Such strategic decisions should incorporate not only recent reward history, but also opportunity costs and environmental statistics. Previous neuroima...

The standard paradigm for probing sensory decision making, the two-alternative forced choice task (2AFC), bears striking resemblance to the problem confronted by a soccer goalkeeper defending a penalty kick—albeit without the legions of noisy fans. The average penalty kick clocks in at a speed of around 20 m/s, leaving the average goalkeeper, stati...

The Path Not Taken People readily recognize that unchosen actions have consequences and adjust their behavior accordingly. The ability to recognize fictive outcomes is thought to be a necessary component of regret, and disruptions in this ability may cause anxiety and problem gambling. Do animals engage in this same process? Hayden et al. (p. 948 )...

In this work, we examine ideas connected with the noncommutativity of spacetime and its realizations in string theory. Motivated by Matrix Theory and the AdS-CFT correspondence, we propose a survey of selected noncommutative objects, assessing their implications for inflation, gauge theory duals, and solvable backgrounds. Our initial pair of exampl...

Employing the string bit formalism of [18], we identify the basis transformation that relates BMN operators in Script N = 4 gauge theory to string states in the dual string field theory at finite g2 = J2/N. In this basis, the supercharge truncates at linear order in g2, and the mixing amplitude between 1 and 2-string states precisely matches with t...

We consider the dynamics of p anti-D3 branes inside the Klebanov-Strassler geometry, the deformed conifold with M units of RR 3-form flux around the S^3. We find that for p<<M the system relaxes to a nonsupersymmetric NS 5-brane ``giant graviton'' configuration, which is classically stable, but quantum mechanically can tunnel to a nearby supersymme...

The oscillation frequencies of collective excitations of a trapped Bose-Einstein condensate, when calculated in the mean-field approximation and in the Thomas-Fermi limit, are independent of the scattering length $a$. We calculate the leading corrections to the frequencies from quantum fluctuations around the mean field. The semiclassical correctio...