• Home
• Staff & Students
• Vacancies

Tom Verguts

 

 

Wednesday 29th January 2014

Time: 4pm

 

Basement Seminar Room

Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR

 

Reinforcement, learning, and cognitive control

 

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.

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.