
MARCH 13–16 • 2021
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
03/16/2021 1:00 PM
03/16/2021 1:30 PM
America/New_York
CNS 2021 | Young Investigator Award Lecture: Modeling the Role of Executive Functions in Reinforcement Learning
This Symposium can be viewed at the CNS 2021 Virtual Meeting in the Cerebrum Room. Click here to access the CNS 2021 Virtual Meeting. https://www.cogneurosociety.org/cns-2021-virtual-meeting-access-link/
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
03/16/2021 1:30 PM
03/16/2021 2:00 PM
America/New_York
CNS 2021 | Young Investigator Award Lecture: Weighing the Value of Control
This Symposium can be viewed at the CNS 2021 Virtual Meeting in the Cerebrum Room. Click here to access the CNS 2021 Virtual Meeting. https://www.cogneurosociety.org/cns-2021-virtual-meeting-access-link/
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.
Previous Winners
2020
Catherine Hartley, New York University
Samuel J. Gershman, Harvard University
2019Muireann Irish, The University of Sydney, Australia |
2018Morgan Barense, University of Toronto |
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2017Leah Somerville, Ph.D., Harvard University |
2016Adriana Galvan, UCLA |
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2015Donna Rose Addis, Ph.D., University of Auckland, NZ |
2014Daphna Shohamy, Ph.D. , Columbia University |
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2013Uta Noppeney, Ph.D., University of Birmingham, UK |
2012Adam Aron, Ph.D., University of California San Diego Roshan Cools, Ph.D., Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour |
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2011Michael J. Frank, Ph.D., Brown University |
2010Kara Federmeier, University of Illinois |
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2009Lila Davachi, New York University |
2008Charan Ranganath, University of California Davis |
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2007Silvia A. Bunge, University of California |
2006Frank Tong, Vanderbilt University |
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2005Sabine Kastner, Princeton University |
2004Anthony Wagner, Stanford University |
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2003Roberto Cabeza, Duke University |
2002Isabel Gauthier, Vanderbilt University |