About the YIA Award

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

Congratulations to Catherine Hartley and Samuel J. Gershman for being awarded the 2020 Young Investigator Award. Catherine Hartley and Samuel J. Gershman will give their award lectures on Monday, March 16, 2020, 1:30 –2:30 pm, in Grand Ballroom of the Sheraton Boston Hotel.

Developmental tuning of action selection

Catherine A. Hartley

Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science, New York University

A diverse set of learning, memory, and decision-making processes enable us to respond adaptively to environmental challenges and opportunities. These cognitive processes, supported by dynamic interactions between subcortical and prefrontal circuitry, change markedly from childhood to adulthood. In this talk, I will present work characterizing developmental changes in the cognitive representations and computations engaged to evaluate and select actions as the brain develops.  I will discuss how these changes may optimize behavior for an individual’s developmental stage and unique life experiences.

 

Structured reinforcement learning

Samuel J. Gershman

Associate Professor, Department of Psychology and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University

In this talk, I will survey classical ideas about reinforcement learning in the brain, some of their successes, and the challenges they confront when dealing with real-world complexity. The drive to develop computational solutions to these challenges has led to new insights into the functions of dopamine, the hippocampus, and the prefrontal cortex. A common theme is the need for solutions that exploit structure in the environment.

 

---

Previous Winners

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