Research Professor, Computer Science, Robotics and CNBC Carnegie Mellon University Phone: (412) 268-7561 Fax: (412) 268-3608 Email: dst@cs.cmu.edu Individual Website: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst

Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University

Research Interests

Dr. Touretzky's primary interest is how information is represented and processed in the mammalian brain. A major current area of investigation is rodent navigation, modeling the responses of hippocampal place cells and head direction cells under various experimental conditions. There is evidence that the rodent's "cognitive map" combines visual landmark information with another, internal sense of position maintained by path integration. Computational models developed by Dr. Touretzky and his students that incorporate these representations have reproduced a wide variety of behavioral and neurophysiological observations, and led to novel predictions about the operation of the rodent navigation system, some of which have now been confirmed experimentally.

A second line of research concerns computational models of conditioning in animals. Dr. Touretzky's initial work in this area produced symbolic-level models of shaping and chaining. These models have been implemented on a mobile robot; the goal is to allow robots to be taught using the same sorts of training techniques traditionally employed with animals. Current robotics work utilizes the Sony AIBO dog robot; see the Tekkotsu.org web site for details. Additional work concerns neural-level models of animal learning, with particular focus on the role of dopamine as a reward signal and the computational functions of the basal ganglia.

Recent Publications

• Daw ND, Courville AC, Touretzky DS: Representation and timing in theories of the dopamine system. Neural Comput 18(7):1637-1677, 2006.
• Fuhs MC, Touretzky DS: A spin glass model of path integration in rat medial entorhinal cortex. J Neurosci 26(16):4266-4276, 2006.
• Fuhs MC, VanRhoads SR, Casale AE, McNaughton B, Touretzky DS: Influence of path integration vs. environmental orientation on place cell remapping between visually identical environments. J Neurophysiol 94(4):2603-16, 2005.
• Touretzky DS, Weisman WE, Fuhs MC, Skaggs WE, Fenton AA, Muller RU: Deforming the hippocampal map. Hippocampus 15(1): 41-55, 2005.
• Daw ND, Courville AC, Touretzky DS: Timing and partial observability in the dopamine system. In S. Becker, S. Thrun, and K. Obermayer (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 15. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
• Daw ND, Touretzky DS: Long-term reward prediction in TD models of the dopamine system. Neural Comput 14(11): 2567-2583, 2002.
• Goodridge JP, Touretzky DS: Modeling attractor deformation in the rodent head direction system. J Neurophysiol 83(6): 3402-3410, 2000.
• PubMed Citations