Abdol-hossein Vahabie
Principal Investigator
Affiliation: School of Cognitive Sciences (SCS) Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM)
Contact: vahabi [at] ipm [dot] ir

Description:

1- Neuronal dynamics
Neuronal networks represent and process the information using their dynamic neurons.
Neuronal dynamics depend on their intrinsic dynamics and also synaptic dynamics. How
neurons interactively and dynamically represent the information is an important question in the systems neuroscience field.
Using computational modeling and neural data analysis, we try to reveal important aspects of neural representations, especially changes in representation due to adaptation, attention, working memory, and neuromodulators.


2- Decision making and reinforcement learning
Decision making is a complex process that depends on evidence accumulation and subjective values and subjective probabilities that are assigned to the outcomes of decisions. There are many irrationalities in the people behavior that are the subject of many studies in neuroscience, psychology and behavioral economics. Moreover, people learn the value of options in the way that is consistent with the Reinforcement Learning models. People also learn the values from observing the actions of other people. This learning is named observational learning. We try to understand the underlying factors in constructing the decisions of people using behavioral paradigms and modeling approach. We are especially interested in the social interaction and its role in decision making and observational learning.


3- Computational psychiatry
Computational psychiatry is an emerging field that wants to model the psychiatric disorders with the models of decision making, reinforcement learning, game theory and neuronal network modeling. The main goal is to find the problems in neuronal processing of psychiatric patients. A necessary step in understanding the disorders is to better understand the individual differences in healthy people and then recruit these factors in better evaluation of pathologic conditions. Using the above mentioned research lines and extending them to individual difference research, we try to develop paradigms for evaluation of the behavior of healthy and patient people.

Collaborators


Mohammadreza Abolghasemi Dehaqani
University of Tehran and IPM

Bahador Bahrami
LMU, Germany

Hossein Esteky
Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

Yaser Merrikhi
IPM

Babak Nadjar Araab
University of Tehran

Majid Nili Ahmadabadi
University of Tehran

Saeid Safari
University of Tehran

Mir Shahram Safari
Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences

Selected Publications


1- MR. Dehaghani, H. Vahabie, MB. Parsa, B. Noudoost and AR. Soltani (2018). Selective Changes in Noise Correlations Contribute to an Enhanced Representation of Saccadic Targets in Prefrontal Neuronal Ensembles, Cerebral Cortex, 1-18

2- Akbarzadeh-Sherbaf, K., Abdoli, B., Safari, S., & Vahabie, A. H. (2018). A Scalable FPGA Architecture for Randomly Connected Networks of Hodgkin-Huxley Neurons. Frontiers in neuroscience, 12, 698. doi:10.3389/fnins.2018.00698

3- H. Vahabie, M. Abolghasemi, M. Nili, B. Araabi and H. Esteky (2017). Rapid face adaptation distributes representation in inferior-temporal cortex across time and neuronal dimensions Scientific Reports, 7 1-13

4- M.R.A. Dehaqani, A. Vahabie, R. Kiani, M. Ahmadabadi, B. Araabi and H. Esteky(2016). Temporal dynamics of visual category representation in the macaque inferior temporal cortex, Journal of Neurophysiology 116 587-601

5- M.R.A. Dehaqani, M.A. Zarei, A.H. Vahabie and H. Esteky (2016). Impairment of perceptual closure in autism for vertex-but not edge-defined object images Journal of Vision 16, 10-10