时间： 2014年2月25日（星期二），下午4:30---5:30

地点： 心理学院201室

Speaker

Tom Verguts

Title

Reinforcement, learning, and cognitive control

Abstract

Learning and cognitive control are often portrayed as functional opposites: In familiar situations, we rely on (learned) habits, in novel situations, we exert cognitive control. Ironically, however, over the last decade computational modeling on how cognitive control is mechanistically implemented, is revealing a fundamental role for learning in cognitive control. In my earliest work in this domain, I investigated the role of Hebbian learning in cognitive control; later of reinforcement learning in cognitive control; and finally the role of cost (effort) processing as one specific dimension of value. Behavioral, fMRI, and modeling work from each of the three lines will be discussed in the talk.

CV

-          2001: PhD in psychology (KULeuven)

-          2002: Assistant professor (Ghent University)

-          2012: Full professor (Ghent University)

Representative publications

Verguts, T., & Notebaert, W. (2009). Adaptation by binding: a learning account of cognitive control. Trends in cognitive sciences, 13(6), 252–7.

Roggeman, C., Santens, S., Fias, W., & Verguts, T. (2011). Stages of nonsymbolic number processing in occipitoparietal cortex disentangled by fMRI adaptation. Journal of neuroscience, 31(19), 7168–73.

Silvetti, M., Alexander, W. H., Verguts, T., & Brown, J. W. (in press). From conflict management to reward-based decision making: Actors and critics in primate medial frontal cortex. Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews.