Dear All,

We would like to invite you to the next event from the ELTE Cognitive Seminar series:

Tom Verguts

Grounding cognitive control in associative learning

Place: ELTE-PPK, Institute of Psychology, Izabella utca 46, room P3

Time: September 15th, 2016 (Thursday), 10:00-12:30

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1234333133301257/

Abstract

Traditionally, cognitive control and associative learning have been studied in different research traditions. In the cognitive control tradition, cognitive control is considered to go beyond, or be independent from, associative learning (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974; Bugg & Crump, 2012). However, recent models of cognitive control that have tried to pinpoint its computational and neural basis have, ironically, found associative learning to be an excellent basis for implementing cognitive control (Abrahamse, Braem, Notebaert, & Verguts, 2016; O’Reilly & Frank, 2006). 

I will describe some of these models (Verguts & Notebaert, 2008; Verguts, Vassena, & Silvetti, 2015), and how they inform both behavioral and neural data. Behaviorally, a major emerging theme is choosing to invest effort in a task (or not); neurally, a major emerging theme is the role of anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in relation to subcortical (dopamine, noradrenaline) structures. 

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References

Abrahamse, E. L., Braem, S., Notebaert, W., & Verguts, T. (2016). Grounding cognitive control in associative learning. Psychological Bulletin, 142(7), 693–728.

Baddeley, A., & Hitch, G. J. (1974). Working memory. In G. D. Bower (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (pp. 47–89). Academic Press.

Bugg, J. M., & Crump, M. J. C. (2012). In Support of a Distinction between Voluntary and Stimulus-Driven Control: A Review of the Literature on Proportion Congruent Effects. Frontiers in Psychology, 3(September). http://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00367

O’Reilly, R. C., & Frank, M. J. (2006). Making working memory work: a computational model of learning in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. Neural Computation, 18(2), 283–328. http://doi.org/10.1162/089976606775093909

Verguts, T., & Notebaert, W. (2008). Hebbian learning of cognitive control: dealing with specific and nonspecific adaptation. Psychological Review, 115(2), 518–25. http://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.115.2.518

Verguts, T., Vassena, E., & Silvetti, M. (2015). Adaptive effort investment in cognitive and physical tasks: A neurocomputational model. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 9, 1–17.