CNS 2022 | Young Investigator Award Lectures

Congratulations to Oriel FeldmanHall and Vishnu Murty for being awarded the 2022 Young Investigator Award. We look forward to hearing their award lectures at CNS 2022!

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.

 

Navigating our Uncertain Social Worlds

Oriel FeldmanHall

Brown University
Monday, April 25, 2022, 1:30 - 2:00PM (PT), Grand Ballroom A

Interacting with others is one of the most inherently uncertain acts we embark on. There are a multitude of unknowns, including how to express ourselves, who to confide in, or whether to engage in risky behavior with our peers. All this uncertainty makes successfully navigating the social world a tremendous challenge. Combining behavioral and neuroscientific methods, we explore the social and emotional factors that shape and ultimately guide how humans learn to make adaptive decisions amongst this great uncertainty. In particular, we borrow models from the animal learning literature, and methods from computational neuroscience and machine learning, to examine how humans experience, process, and resolve this uncertainty to make more adaptive decisions.

 

Goal States Tailor the Content and Structure of Episodic Memory

Vishnu "Deepu" Murty

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Temple University

Monday, April 25, 2022, 2:00 - 2:30PM (PT), Grand Ballroom A

Memories are not veridical representations of the environment; rather individuals’ goals and desires shape how and what they store in long-term memory. This type of memory selectivity is sub-served by engagement of different neuromodulatory systems—such as the VTA and LC, responding to salient cues in the environment—which initiate a sequela of events leading to different memory outcomes. My research program focuses on characterizing how different motivational states bias encoding towards discrete learning systems and further propagate memory transformation via systems-consolidation.  In this talk, I will highlight recent work characterizing how different goal states—namely exploration and threat—influence long-term memory. Specifically, I will highlight behavioral, neuroimaging, and computational modelling approaches to detail how exploration leads to highly associative, causal representations of the environment, whereas threat leads to sensory-based representations capturing the most salient features of the environment in the absence of contextual details. I will further show how memory encoding under these different goal states may contribute to maladaptive behaviors related to risk for developing psychosis and PTSD, respectively. I will end this talk with effusive commentary about the support of the wonderful community of cognitive neuroscientist that have supported these efforts.

 

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Previous Winners

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