Murray Lab
Principal Investigator: John David Murray
Institution: Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
A hallmark of biological intelligence is the ability to learn from a remarkably small set of experiences to select appropriate behaviors in novel contexts. This ability arises from inductive bias, referring to the assumptions used in generalizing prior observations to novel data. In machine learning, inductive bias is essential for efficient learning from a small number of examples as animals frequently do. In neuroscience, inductive bias has been mostly considered as shaped by evolution to produce an innate inductive bias. Although an agent’s inductive bias should be adaptive to changing task demands, how brains develop inductive bias, use it to guide learning, and adapt it to task statistics, remain poorly understood. The overall goal of this project is to study the neural and computational bases of inductive bias adaptation by training non-human primates on a novel learning task, characterizing choice behavior and neuronal activity, and developing computational models of learning in neural networks. Our theoretical framework of neural kernel learning makes precise predictions for behavior and neural activity that will be experimentally tested in the proposed studies. We will cha…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01MH132386-05: CRCNS: Neural Basis of Inductive Bias (2026)
- 5R01MH132386-04: CRCNS: Neural Basis of Inductive Bias (2025)
- 5R01MH132386-03: CRCNS: Neural Basis of Inductive Bias (2024)
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