Integrated Calendar

A quarter of the proteome in every living cell is comprised of helical membrane proteins. Our understanding of how they fold, assemble and undergo quality control remains poor, despite relevance to many diseases. I will describe our quest to illuminate the features of unfolded membrane proteins, and how these attributes drive the mechanisms of membrane protein folding and quality control.

The ability to use information to adaptively guide behavior is central to intelligence. A vital research challenge is to establish how people decide what they want to know. In this talk I will present our recent research characterizing three key motives of information seeking. We find that participants automatically assess (i) how useful information is in directing action, (ii) how it will make them feel, and (iii) how it will influence their ability to predict and understand the world around them. They then integrate these assessments into a calculation of the value of information that guides information-seeking or its avoidance. These diverse influences are captured by separate brain regions along the dopamine reward pathway and are differentially modulated by pharmacological manipulation of dopamine function. The findings yield predictions about how information-seeking behavior will alter in disorders in which the reward system malfunctions. We test these predictions using a linguistic analysis of participants’ web searches ‘in the wild’ to quantify their motives for seeking information and relate those to reported psychiatric symptoms. Finally, using controlled behavioral experiments we show that the three motives for seeking information follow different developmental trajectories that are consistent with what would be predicted from our neuroimaging data.


Zoom link to join:
https://weizmann.zoom.us/j/96608033618?pwd=SEdJUkR2ZzRBZ3laUUdGbWR1VFJTdz09

Meeting ID: 966 0803 3618
Password: 564068

Host: Dr. Rita Schmidt rita.schmidt@weizmann.ac.il tel: 9070