Shanice Bailey, PhD student in the Isogai Lab at SWC, shares her journey in science so far, her experience in the Black In Neuro community and what inspired her to embark on a PhD in systems neuroscience.

How do we measure a thought? In cognitive neuroscience, researchers aim to relate neural activity to thoughts, which are notoriously difficult to measure. In his recent SWC Seminar, Dr Pitkow outlined how he uses a new scientific tool to learn an agent’s internal model and reward function by maximising the likelihood of its measured sensory observations and actions. In the following Q&A, Dr Pitkow explains how this tool extracts rational and interpretable thoughts of the agent from its behaviour.