9:45 - 10:00 Welcome words by Rosa Sanchidrian, Exc. Rector of Universidad Europea de Valencia
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10.00- 11.00 Keynote 1 - Dean Mobbs - California Institute of Technology

Title: Survival Decisions in a Complex World

Abstract: How did our nomadic ancestors continually adapt to the seemingly limitless and unpredictable number of dangers in the natural world? Naturalistic observations show that decisions to avoid or escape predators occur at different spatiotemporal scales and that they are supported by different computations and neural circuits. At their extremes, proximal threats are addressed by a limited repertoire of reflexive and myopic actions, reflecting reduced decision and state spaces and model-free (MF) architectures. Conversely, distal threats allow increased information processing supported by model-based (MB) operations, including affective prospection, replay, and planning. However, MF and MB computations are often intertwined, and under conditions of safety, the foundations for future effective reactive execution can be laid through MB instruction of MF control. Together, these computations are associated with distinct population codes embedded within a distributed defensive circuitry whose goal is to determine and realize the best policy.