CNS 2021 | Young Investigator Award Lectures

Congratulations to Anne Collins, UC Berkeley and Amitai Shenhav, Brown University for being awarded the 2021 Young Investigator Award. Anne Collins and Amitai Shenhav will give their award lectures on Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 1:00 – 2:00pm (ET), Cerebrum Room.

 

Modeling the Role of Executive Functions in Reinforcement Learning

Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 1:00 - 1:30 PM (ET), Cerebrum Room

Speaker: Anne Collins, Department of Psychology and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California Berkeley

Humans are uniquely able to flexibly and efficiently adapt to new situations. My talk will describe how this ability emerges from multiple neuro-cognitive processes that jointly and interactively contribute to learning. Reinforcement learning algorithms’ remarkable success in capturing a broad range of learning behavior obscures the reality of multiple underlying processes, such as working memory and reward-based instrumental learning. I will show how computational modeling can help disentangle such contributions. I will also show that executive functions contribute not only learning mechanisms, but also define the learning substrates for other learning mechanisms, setting the stage for what we learn about. Clarifying the contributions and interaction of different learning processes is essential to understanding individual learning differences, particularly in clinical populations and development. This work highlights the importance of studying learning as a multi-dimensional phenomenon that relies on multiple separable but inter-dependent computational mechanisms.

 

Weighing the Value of Control

Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 1:30 - 2:00 PM (ET), Cerebrum Room

Speaker: Amitai Shenhav, Assistant Professor, Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, & Psychological Sciences and Carney Institute for Brain Science, Brown University

Most tasks demand cognitive control, but exerting this control is effortful. How do we balance these two considerations to decide how to invest our cognitive effort? In this talk, I will discuss work in our lab that has sought to address this question, by modeling the cost-benefit analysis that determines how much and what kinds of control a person is willing to exert in a given situation. I will describe how these models have helped guide recent behavioral and neuroimaging research into the component processes that determine one's motivation to exert mental effort. I will also describe how this model-based approach has allowed us to formalize specific hypotheses regarding why mental effort allocation varies across contexts, individuals, and clinical populations, and how it has allowed us to disentangle different sources of such variability (e.g., differences in one's ability vs. desire to engage control processes). Collectively, this work has laid the foundation for further cross-disciplinary research into the neural circuits and computations that drive effortful thoughts and actions, and towards a better understanding of when and why they fail to do so.

About the YIA Award

The purpose of the awards is to recognize outstanding contributions by scientists early in their careers. Two awardees, one male and one female, are named by the Awards Committee, and are honored at the CNS Annual meeting.

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.

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Previous Winners

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