CNS 2026 | Young Investigator Award

Congratulations to Monica Rosenberg and Samuel D. McDougle for being awarded the 2026 Young Investigator Award. We look forward to hearing their award lectures at CNS 2026 in Vancouver, B.C., Canada!

Neural signatures of sustained attention across time scales and individuals

Monica Rosenberg, Ph.D.

University of Chicago
Monday, March 9, 2026, 1:30 - 2:00 pm, Grand Ballroom

Maintaining focus is critical for goal-directed behavior, yet sustained attention is inherently dynamic—fluctuating across seconds, waning across minutes to hours, and developing across childhood and adolescence. How and why does attention vary over time and across individuals? I will show that large-scale functional brain networks can serve as generalizable neural signatures of sustained attention, predicting individual differences and within-person changes when measured during tasks, narratives, and rest. Moreover, I will argue that the primary utility of such brain-based predictive models lies in revealing how attention operates and interacts with broader cognitive processes, offering a framework for understanding variability in cognition across individuals and over time.

 

Generalized prediction errors in the human cerebellum

Samuel D. McDougle, Ph.D.

Department of Psychology, Yale University
Monday, March 9, 2026, 2:00 - 2:30 pm, Grand Ballroom

Your cerebellum contains more neurons and uses more energy than the rest of the brain combined. Evolutionarily, the cerebellum expanded hand-in-hand with the expansion of our species’ cerebral cortex. It may not be surprising, then, that in addition to the cerebellum’s well-known role in sensorimotor behavior, this remarkable structure is implicated in language, working memory, cognitive control, and social cognition. One enduring mystery, however, is how specifically the cerebellum supports cognition. My lab has begun to explore the idea that cerebellar contributions to nonmotor tasks may involve the same prediction and error-based learning principles observed in cerebellar sensorimotor computations. Our recent neuroimaging results point to nonmotor prediction errors in ‘cognitive’ regions of the human cerebellar cortex. We observe these signals in both reinforcement learning and statistical learning contexts. Moreover, these signals appear to share constraints with cerebellar sensorimotor computations, including a preference for subsecond temporal intervals between associated events. Our findings suggest that the cerebellum contributes to rapid coordination of cognitive representations, directly echoing its role in motor control. These results expand our understanding of the computational functions of the human cerebellum and blur the lines between the sensorimotor and cognitive domains.

About the YIA Award

The purpose of the Young Investigator Award is to recognize outstanding contributions by scientists early in their career. Two awardees are named by the Awards Committee, and are honored at the CNS Annual meeting.

---

Previous Winners

2025 Emily S. Finn, Dartmouth College Andre' Bastos, Vanderbilt University	2024 Peter Kok, University College London Ella Striem-Amit, Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC
2023 Anna Schapiro, Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania Freek van Ede, Ph.D., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam	2022 Oriel FeldmanHall, Brown University Vishnu "Deepu" Murty, Temple University
2021 Anne Collins, UC Berkeley Amitai Shenhav, Brown University	2020 Catherine Hartley, New York University Samuel J. Gershman, Harvard University
2019 Muireann Irish, The University of Sydney, Australia Michael W. Cole, Rutgers University – Newark	2018 Morgan Barense, University of Toronto Michael Yassa, University of California, Irvine
2017 Leah Somerville, Ph.D., Harvard University Nicholas Turk-Browne, Ph.D., Princeton University	2016 Adriana Galvan, UCLA Joel Voss, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine
2015 Donna Rose Addis, Ph.D., University of Auckland, NZ Christopher Summerfield, Ph.D., University of Oxford	2014 Daphna Shohamy, Ph.D. , Columbia University David Badre, Ph.D., Brown University
2013 Uta Noppeney, Ph.D., University of Birmingham, UK Tor Wager, Ph.D., University of Colorado	2012 Adam Aron, Ph.D., University of California San Diego Roshan Cools, Ph.D., Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
2011 Michael J. Frank, Ph.D., Brown University Elizabeth Kensinger, Ph.D., Boston College	2010 Kara Federmeier, University of Illinois Adam Anderson, University of Toronto
2009 Lila Davachi, New York University Clayton Curtis, New York University	2008 Charan Ranganath, University of California Davis Kevin Ochsner, Columbia University Rebecca Saxe, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2007 Silvia A. Bunge, University of California Steven Laureys, MD, University of Liège	2006 Frank Tong, Vanderbilt University Alumit Ishai, University of Zurich
2005 Sabine Kastner, Princeton University Kevin LaBar, Duke University	2004 Anthony Wagner, Stanford University Eleanor Maguire, University College London
2003 Roberto Cabeza, Duke University Sharon Thompson-Schill, University of Pennsylvania	2002 Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University Randy Buckner, Washington University Saint Louis