Cognitive Psychology seminars

Traditional work in the study of human reward-based learning involves designing an experimental task---often inspired by Reinforcement Learning (RL) theory---and fits a small set of computational models---often inspired by RL algorithms---to that dataset. For example, researchers often model human behavior on bandit tasks using variants of Q-learning. While this approach has been highly productive, leading to landmark discoveries such as the dopamine reward prediction error hypothesis, it also has limitations. This talk focuses on the lack of generalizability of such models: Even if they closely fit behavior on the original task, models derived from the one-task-one-model paradigm usually predict behavior on other tasks quite poorly. I argue that this lack of generalizability is a fundamental problem for the cognitive sciences: we intuitively expect our models to be robust to superficial task differences, such as variations in the number of choice options, reward probabilities, or the exact kind of non-stationarity. I will propose potential solutions to this problem along two dimensions: the behavioral dataset and the computational model. Regarding computational models, I will introduce work in which we moved beyond the limitations of hand-crafted one-off models by employing flexible, data-driven methods. These methods allowed us to compare classes of models instead of individual model instances, allowing us to cover the space of possible models more exhaustively, and innovate cognitive mechanisms very efficiently. For the behavioral dataset, we move from using single learning tasks to a comprehensive task space that encompasses most existing paradigms in the literature, while closing the gaps between them in a near-continuous fashion. Our results suggest that more general models in conjunction with broader datasets can pave the road toward increasingly general models of human reward-based learning and decision making, and a persistent departure from many aspects of RL theory. Presented in the van Vreeswijk Theoretical Neuroscience Seminar series (formerly WWTNS) on 2026-05-20. Recording duration: 00:51:19.

Reward expectations – one’s prediction about the likelihood of future outcomes - play a central role in shaping the satisfaction derived from those outcomes. Most existing research treats expectations as static, assuming they remain fixed in time. However, real-life expectations are often dynamic, fluctuating as new information becomes available. For example, during a soccer game, your expectations of seeing your team winning will likely rise and fall as the game unfolds. In the main part of this talk, I will present a series of studies demonstrating that human expectations can be tracked at sub-second timescales. Using slot machines as a case study, we leverage the continuous deceleration of the reels to elicit moment-by-moment fluctuations in rewardexpectations. To capture these dynamics, we take complementary approaches: we use the high temporal resolution of electroencephalography (EEG) to track neural signatures of evolving expectations, and we develop a novel behavioral paradigm (“Slot or Not”) designed to measure changes in expectations via betting behavior. Across four studies, we show that expectations fluctuate continuously and can be tracked both behaviorally and neurally. Extending these findings, a subsequent intracranial study shows that the human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) encodes the moment-by-moment changes of reward expectations. In the second part of this talk, I will return to the relationship between expectations andsatisfaction. If expectations shape satisfaction, and if they are best conceptualized as dynamic trajectories rather than static quantities, a key question arises: does the trajectory leading up to an outcome influence how that outcome is evaluated? I will outline a new research direction aimed at formalizing this relationship using computational modeling. This is ongoing work, and I welcome feedback on how best to formalize these ideas. Finally, I will discuss potential extensions of this framework to psychopathology, asking whether alterations in dynamic expectations may characterize conditions such as Major Depressive Disorder and Gambling disorder. Together, this work introduces a new framework for studying expectations as dynamic processes, offering a richer understanding Presented in the van Vreeswijk Theoretical Neuroscience Seminar series (formerly WWTNS) on 2026-04-29. Recording duration: 00:42:25.

Decades of research on understanding the mechanisms of attentional selection have focused on identifying the units (representations) on which attention operates in order to guide prioritized sensory processing. These attentional units fit neatly to accommodate our understanding of how attention is allocated in a top-down, bottom-up, or historical fashion. In this talk, I will focus on attentional phenomena that are not easily accommodated within current theories of attentional selection – the “attentional platypuses,” as they allude to an observation that within biological taxonomies the platypus does not fit into either mammal or bird categories. Similarly, attentional phenomena that do not fit neatly within current attentional models suggest that current models need to be revised. I list a few instances of the ‘attentional platypuses” and then offer a new approach, the Dynamically Weighted Prioritization, stipulating that multiple factors impinge onto the attentional priority map, each with a corresponding weight. The interaction between factors and their corresponding weights determines the current state of the priority map which subsequently constrains/guides attention allocation. I propose that this new approach should be considered as a supplement to existing models of attention, especially those that emphasize categorical organizations.

Using videos from the Deepfake Detection Challenge (cf. Groh et al., 2021), we investigated human deepfake detection performance (DDP) in two unique observer groups: Super-Recognizers (SRs) and "normal" officers from within the 18K members of the Berlin Police. SRs were identified either via previously proposed lab-based procedures (Ramon, 2021) or the only existing tool for SR identification involving increasingly challenging, authentic forensic material: beSure® (Berlin Test For Super-Recognizer Identification; Ramon & Rjosk, 2022). Across two experiments we examined deepfake detection performance (DDP) in participants who judged single videos and pairs of videos in a 2AFC decision setting. We explored speed-accuracy trade-offs in DDP, compared DDP between lab-identified SRs and non-SRs, and police officers whose face identity processing skills had been extensively tested using challenging. In this talk I will discuss our surprising findings and argue that further work is needed too determine whether face identity processing is related to DDP or not.

An understanding of the self helps explain not only human thoughts, feelings, attitudes but also many aspects of everyday behaviour. This talk focuses on a viewpoint - self as processes. This viewpoint emphasizes the dynamics of the self that best connects with the development of the self over time and its realist orientation. We are combining psychological experiments and data mining to comprehend the stability and adaptability of the self across various populations. In this talk, I draw on evidence from experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and machine learning approaches to demonstrate why and how self-association affects cognition and how it is modulated by various social experiences and situational factors

Working memory is about the past but for the future. Adopting such a future-focused perspective shifts the narrative of working memory as a limited-capacity storage system to working memory as an anticipatory buffer that helps us prepare for potential and sequential upcoming 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 selective attention plays a vital role in prioritising internal contents for behaviour, and the bi-directional links between visual working memory and action. These studies show how studying the dynamics of working memory, selective attention, and action together paves way for an integrated understanding of how mind serves behaviour.

The sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of controlling one's own behavior and, through them, external events. Why is this subjective feeling important for humans? Is it just a by-product of our actions? Previous studies have shown that the sense of agency can affect the intensity of sensory input because we predict the input from our motor intention. However, my research has found that the sense of agency plays more roles than just predictions. It enhances perceptual processes of sensory input and potentially helps to harvest more information about the link between the external world and the self. Furthermore, our recent research found both indirect and direct evidence that the sense of agency is important for people's exploratory behaviors, and this may be linked to proximal exploitations of one's control in the environment. In this talk, I will also introduce the paradigms we use to study the sense of agency as a result of perceptual processes, and our findings of individual differences in this sense and the implications.

Following the seminal structure mapping theory by Dedre Gentner, the process of mapping the corresponding structures of relations defining two analogs has been understood as a key component of analogy making. However, not without a merit, in recent years some semantic, pragmatic, and perceptual aspects of analogy mapping attracted primary attention of analogy researchers. For almost a decade, our team have been re-focusing on relational structure mapping, investigating its potential mechanisms across various analogy tasks, both abstract (semantically-lean) and more concrete (semantically-rich), using diverse methods (behavioral, correlational, eye-tracking, EEG). I will present the overview of our main findings. They suggest that structure mapping (1) consists of an incremental construction of the ultimate mental representation, (2) which strongly depends on working memory resources and reasoning ability, (3) even if as little as a single trivial relation needs to be represented mentally. The effective mapping (4) is related to the slowest brain rhythm – the delta band (around 2-3 Hz) – suggesting its highly integrative nature. Finally, we have developed a new task – Graph Mapping – which involves pure mapping of two explicit relational structures. This task allows for precise investigation and manipulation of the mapping process in experiments, as well as is one of the best proxies of individual differences in reasoning ability. Structure mapping is as crucial to analogy as Gentner advocated, and perhaps it is crucial to cognition in general.

Research into pitch perception and time perception has typically treated the two as independent processes. However, previous studies of music and speech perception have suggested that pitch and timing information may be processed in an integrated manner, such that the pitch of an auditory stimulus can influence a person’s perception, expectation, and memory of its duration and tempo. Typically, higher-pitched sounds are perceived as faster and longer in duration than lower-pitched sounds with identical timing. We conducted a series of experiments to better understand the limits of this pitch-time integrality. Across several experiments, we tested whether the higher-equals-faster illusion generalizes across the broader frequency range of human hearing by asking participants to compare the tempo of a repeating tone played in one of six octaves to a metronomic standard. When participants heard tones from all six octaves, we consistently found an inverted U-shaped effect of the tone’s pitch height, such that perceived tempo peaked between A4 (440 Hz) and A5 (880 Hz) and decreased at lower and higher octaves. However, we found that the decrease in perceived tempo at extremely high octaves could be abolished by exposing participants to high-pitched tones only, suggesting that pitch-induced timing biases are context sensitive. We additionally tested how the timing of an auditory stimulus influences the perception of its pitch, using a pitch discrimination task in which probe tones occurred early, late, or on the beat within a rhythmic context. Probe timing strongly biased participants to rate later tones as lower in pitch than earlier tones. Together, these results suggest that pitch and time exert a bidirectional influence on one another, providing evidence for integrated processing of pitch and timing information in auditory perception. Identifying the mechanisms behind this pitch-time interaction will be critical for integrating current models of pitch and tempo processing.

The predictive map hypothesis provides a promising framework to model representations in the hippocampal formation. I will introduce a tractable implementation of a predictive map called the successor representation (SR), before presenting data showing that rats and humans display SR-like navigational choices on a novel open-field maze. Next, I will show how such a predictive map could be implemented using spatial representations found in the hippocampal formation, before finally presenting how such learning might be well approximated by phenomena that exist in the spatial memory system - namely spike-timing dependent plasticity and theta phase precession.

Executive control processes and flexible behaviors rely on the integrity of, and dynamic interactions between, large-scale functional brain networks. The right insular cortex is a critical component of a salience/midcingulo-insular network that is thought to mediate interactions between brain networks involved in externally oriented (central executive/lateral frontoparietal network) and internally oriented (default mode/medial frontoparietal network) processes. How these brain systems reconfigure with development is a critical question for cognitive neuroscience, with implications for neurodevelopmental pathologies affecting brain connectivity. I will describe studies examining how brain network dynamics support flexible behaviors in typical and atypical development, presenting evidence suggesting a unique role for the dorsal anterior insular from studies of meta-analytic connectivity modeling, dynamic functional connectivity, and structural connectivity. These findings from adults, typically developing children, and children with autism suggest that structural and functional maturation of insular pathways is a critical component of the process by which human brain networks mature to support complex, flexible cognitive processes throughout the lifespan.

Playing action video games involves both explicit (conscious) and implicit (non-conscious) expectations of timed events, such as the appearance of foes. While studies revealed that explicit attention skills are improved in action video game players (VGPs), their implicit skills remained untested. To this end, we investigated explicit and implicit temporal processing in VGPs and non-VGPs (control participants). In our variable foreperiod task, participants were immersed in a virtual reality and instructed to respond to a visual target appearing at variable delays after a cue. I will present behavioral, oculomotor and EEG data and discuss possible markers of the implicit passage of time and explicit temporal attention processing. All evidence indicates that VGPs have enhanced implicit skills to track the passage of time, which does not require conscious attention. Thus, action video game play may improve a temporal processing found altered in psychopathologies, such as schizophrenia. Could digital (game-based) interventions help remediate temporal processing deficits in psychiatric populations?

Our ability to perceive the world around us can be affected by a number of factors including the nature of the external information, prior experience of the environment, and the integrity of the underlying perceptual system. A particular challenge for the brain is to maintain a coherent perception from information encoded by the peripheral sensory organs whose function is affected by typical, developmental changes across the lifespan. Yet, how the brain adapts to the maturation of the senses, as well as experiential changes in the multisensory environment, is poorly understood. Over the past few years, we have used a range of multisensory tasks to investigate the role of ageing on the brain’s ability to merge sensory inputs. In particular, we have embedded an audio-visual task based on the sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI) into a large-scale, longitudinal study of ageing. Our findings support the idea that the temporal binding window (TBW) is modulated by age and reveal important individual differences in this TBW that may have clinical implications. However, our investigations also suggest the TWB is experience-dependent with evidence for both long and short term behavioural plasticity. An overview of these findings, including recent evidence on how multisensory integration may be associated with higher order functions, will be discussed.

This talk will focus on our lab's extensive research on understanding and enhancing creative analogical reasoning. I will cover the development of the analogy finding matrix task, evidence for conscious augmentation of creative state during this task, and the real-world implications this ability has for college STEM education. I will also discuss recent research aimed at enhancing performance on this creative analogical reasoning task using both transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS).

Can we learn without conscious awareness? Numerous evidences in the research of implicit learning have indicated that people can learn the statistical structure of the stimuli but seemingly without any awareness of its underlying rules. However, it remains unclear what types of knowledge can be learned in implicit learning, what is the relationship between conscious and unconscious knowledge, and what are the neural substrates for the acquisition of conscious and unconscious knowledge. In this talk, I will discuss with you about these ongoing questions.

Visual perceptual learning (VPL) is defined as improved performance on a visual task due to visual experience. It was once argued that attention to a visual feature is necessary for VPL of the feature to occur. Contrary to this view, a phenomenon called task-irrelevant VPL demonstrated that VPL can occur due to exposure to a feature which is sub-threshold and task-irrelevant, and therefore, unattended. A series of findings based on task-irrelevant VPL has indicated the following two mechanisms. First, attention to a feature facilitates VPL of the feature while inhibiting VPL of unattended and supra-threshold features. Second, reward paired with a feature enables VPL of the feature irrespective of whether the feature is attended or not. However, we recently found an additional twist; VPL of a task-irrelevant and supra-threshold feature embedded in a natural scene is not subject to the inhibition of attention. This new finding suggests a need to revise the current view or add a new mechanism as to how VPL occurs.