Most widely studied option evaluation strategies rely on knowledge accumulated across repeated experiences. But how should options be evaluated in ...

Flexible decision making depends on retrieving and recombining memories. Yet because this process unfolds covertly, its governing principles remain unknown. Here we use gaze reinstatement to uncover t...

We tend to interpret feedback in ways that confirm our pre-existing beliefs. Such confirmatory tendencies are often viewed as cognitive flaws, but mig…

Children are adept statistical learners, capable of parsing streams of structured input into meaningful units, but the cognitive processes they engage during learning may differ from those of adults...

Early in development, children can infer latent structure in the world from sparse and ambiguous evidence. Through a process known as structure learning, they extract statistical regularities, const...

The neuroscience of planning has long been analogized to search algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI), which simulate future actions to guide immediate choices. We argue that advances in both neu...

march 16th, workshop day 1 @ cosyne 2026

Nicholas and Mattar found that people use episodic memory to make decisions when it is unclear what will be needed in the future. These findings reveal how the rich representational capacity of episod...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

The Translational Lab will be reviewing applications this cycle! Prospective students can apply through Clinical Science or Cognitive and Computational Sciences in the Emory Psychology Department to ...

Children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often show lower academic achievement, commonly linked to limited resources. Here, the authors show that reduced exploration–a behavior tuned for learning...

Modelling biological decision-making with tiny recurrent neural networks enables more accurate predictions of animal choices than classical cognitive models and offers insights into the underlying cog...

Our memories do not simply keep time - they warp it, bending the past to fit the structure of our experiences. For example, people tend to remember items as occurring farther apart in time if they spa...

Making rewarding choices can require either generalization or individuation. Here, the authors show that across contexts, people adapt the specificity with which they represent and, increasingly acros...

Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Our experiences contain countless details that may be important in the future, yet we rarely know which will matter and which won't. This uncertainty poses a difficult challenge for adaptive decision ...

30th September - 1st October 2025 Brown University, Rhode Island

Altriciality, or extended early immaturity, creates opportunities for learning. Across languages, Elmlinger et al. show that parents simplify their speech in response to children’s early vocalizations...

In a dynamic reinforcement learning task, human players adaptively employ a mix of decision strategies, including model-based learning but also the successor representation.

A computational account of how schemas are learned through experience is lacking. In this Perspective, Bein and Niv synthesize schema theory and reinforcement learning research to derive computational...