CNS 2023 | Young Investigator Award Lectures, sponsored by The Chen Institute

Congratulations to Anna Schapiro and Freek van Ede for being awarded the 2023 Young Investigator Award. We look forward to hearing their award lectures at CNS 2023!

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. This award is sponsored by The Chen Institute.

 

Learning Representations of Specifics and Generalities Over Time

Anna Schapiro, Ph.D.

University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology

Monday, March 27, 2023, 1:30 - 2:00PM (PT), Grand Ballroom A

There is a fundamental tension between storing discrete traces of individual experiences, which allows recall of particular moments in our past without interference, and extracting regularities across these experiences, which supports generalization and prediction in similar situations in the future. One influential proposal for how the brain resolves this tension is that it separates the processes anatomically into Complementary Learning Systems, with the hippocampus rapidly encoding individual episodes and the neocortex slowly extracting regularities over days, months, and years. But this does not explain our ability to learn and generalize from new regularities in our environment quickly, often within minutes. We have put forward a neural network model of the hippocampus that suggests that the hippocampus itself may contain complementary learning systems, with one pathway specializing in the rapid learning of regularities and a separate pathway handling the region’s classic episodic memory functions. This proposal has broad implications for how we learn and represent novel information of specific and generalized types, which we test across statistical learning, inference, and category learning paradigms. We also explore how this system interacts with slower-learning neocortical memory systems, with empirical and modeling investigations into how the hippocampus shapes neocortical representations during sleep. Together, the work helps us understand how structured information in our environment is initially encoded and how it then transforms over time.

 

Focusing Working Memory for Behaviour

Freek van Ede, Ph.D.

Institute for Brain and Behavior Amsterdam, Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Monday, March 27, 2023, 2:00 - 2:30PM (PT), Grand Ballroom A

Working memory regards the past but serves the future. Adopting this future-focused perspective shifts the narrative of working memory as a temporary storage with limited capacity to working memory as an anticipatory buffer that enables us to prepare for potential and sequential upcoming behaviour. In such a framework, selective attention plays a vital role because it serves not only to bring selected information into working memory but also to dynamically prioritise internal representations for guiding anticipated behaviour. In my talk, I will present a series of our recent studies that have started to reveal emerging principles of a working memory that looks forward – highlighting, amongst others, how working memory incorporates actions rather than merely preceding them. Collectively, these studies show how studying the dynamics of working memory, selective attention, and action together paves way for a rich and integrated understanding of how mind serves behaviour.

 

---

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.

 

Call for 2023 YIA Nominations

The Cognitive Neuroscience Society is pleased to announce the call for nominations for the Young Investigator Awards in Cognitive Neuroscience for the 2023 year.

The submission deadline for submitting a nomination is  December 1, 2022.
Only online submissions will be accepted..

Eligibility

For the 2023 awards, the nominee MUST be:

• Working in any area of cognitive neuroscience (broadly defined).
• No more than 10 years from the receipt of their doctoral degree as of January 1, 2023
• Nominated by another individual (no self nominations will be accepted).
• In attendance at the 2023 meeting to accept the award in person and must agree to give a special lecture.

Consideration will be given to applicants who have taken an institutionally approved childbearing or parental leave (2 year limit).  Also, the residency years for M.D.’s and clinical internship year for Clinical Psychology Ph.D.’s will not be counted against the 10 year limit.

Submitting a Nomination

Before submitting a nomination, collect the required materials:

• Contact information for the nominee.
• A PDF or Word Document of the nominee's CV.
• A short (max 600) word statement of the nominee's research program.
• A PDF or Word Document of a significant publication representative of the nominee's work.
• Bibliographic citations for the publication above AND 4 additional representative publications.
• A PDF or Word Document of a nomination statement from the primary referee (you).
• Contact information for a second referee.
• A PDF or Word Document of a nomination statement from the second referee.

If you have questions about the nomination process, please contact Kate Tretheway.

 

 

---

Previous Winners

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