Speaker : Cendri HUTCHERSON, Department of Psychology University of Toronto
"Neurocomputational approaches to goal pursuit, productivity, and self-control in the lab and real life"
People sometimes succeed, and often fail, to accomplish what they set out to do. What underlies successful vs. failed goal pursuit? Here, I discuss a number of lines of work from our lab showing how a neurally-informed computational approach can be used to understand a variety of phenomena related to self-control in both laboratory contexts and in real-world behaviors. First, I discuss how a neurocomputational framework can be used to understand not only why some choices (e.g., eating healthy) can feel so difficult, but also how we might make them easier. Next, I will outline recent work in which we apply neurocomputational approaches toward modeling fluctuations in daily cognitive and motivational states to understand why it can sometimes feel so difficult to accomplish our goals in daily life. In both cases, our results point to a novel understanding of the importance of trait and state factors shaping the computational dynamics of evidence accumulation during decision making.
Hosted by Hilke PLASSMANN and Liane SCHMIDT
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Please join the conference in Paris Brain Institute auditorium.