Senne Braem
@sebraem
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Professor of cognitive science, Ghent University. Cognitive control, reinforcement learning, fear conditioning, autism.
Ghent, Belgium
Joined May 2018
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Thrilled and grateful to receive this award! And honored to be among these other amazing recipients! I'm especially thankful for all my mentors and collaborators, and hope to pay it forward to my amazing team members. My 6yo was less impressed, he thinks I should study snakes.
It is our pleasure to announce the 2023 Early Career Award recipients. Congratulations, Senne, Elizabeth, Dora, and Sharda!
@sebraem
@chrastil
@dora_matzke
@cmcnews
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We're looking for a postdoc to join our team at Ghent University on the topics of cognitive control and reinforcement learning! Deadline June 28th. For more information, please see .
@GhentCCN
@ERC_Research
@CogNeuroJobs
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It was exciting to try and help think about a common framework with colleagues from cog control, decision making, self control, social and moral cognition, initiated and led by
@DanielaVBecker
& David Dignath. I learned a lot! Now summarized in this paper:
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We're looking for a PhD student on the topic of cognitive control and reinforcement learning! Deadline June 5th. For more information, please see .
@GhentCCN
@ERC_Research
@CogNeuroJobs
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We're looking for two PhD students on the topics of cognitive control and reinforcement learning! Deadline April 4th. For more information, please see . Together with Tom Verguts: .
@GhentCCN
@ERC_Research
@FWOVlaanderen
@CogNeuroJobs
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We have a new preprint by Jonas Simoens, Tom Verguts, and myself, where we wanted to investigate whether people can learn to associate different environments to different learning rates? .
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We wrote a brief opinion article, with
@chaimengqiao
, Leslie Held, and
@ShengjieXu0813
, on why we believe most cognitive control processes should not be considered off-the-shelf processes that can be readily applied in any task, whenever asked to: (1/3)
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I just invited (and immediately uninvited) a first author to review their own manuscript 🤦♂️. It wasn't even a quick and dirty selection... I was quite proud to have found a reviewer with all the relevant expertise.
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Strange to admit as a cognitive scientist, but I only just found out that when people say they imagine something, it's not proverbial, they can actually "see" something, and I seem to have what's called aphantasia. Not sure if I like the name (1/2)
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We have a new paper in JEP:General! We tried to address the question: What if you're instructed a simple task, like "hit the right button when you see a pony", and are asked to forget about it immediately after (before you could execute the task)? . (1/6)
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My 3-yr-old was confused when I told him I'll be working from home now... Apparently, he thought my job was taking elevators. He also thinks I'm good at it, so I'm quite proud, actually.
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Just had a great day of inspiring datablitz talks on cognitive control research at our department. Thanks for the initiative & organisation
@pruteannicoleta
&
@ivan_ivanchei
!
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I'm still very humbled and thankful to be receiving an ERC StG, which also allows me to start a faculty position and research lab (back) at Ghent University next month. There sure is luck involved in getting these things, so I sympathize a lot with this thread by
@NeilLewisJr
:
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I promised our son to take him to the cinema for his 5th birthday. I explained how big the screen will be, and now he's excited about getting a proportionally sized remote control.
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We have some distraction for you from the frustrating conflict you might experience between trying to work and refreshing your browser for election results
Out now in Journal of Neuroscience: "Shared Neural Representations of Cognitive Conflict and Negative Affect in the Medial Frontal Cortex" w/ V. Hoofs, C. González-García,
@wisneurowski
,
@Wnotebaert
and
@sebraem
. Thread below! .
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Excited to announce that we're looking for two PhD students to study cognitive flexibility! (as part of the CoCoFlex project
@ERC_Research
)
Two positions for PhD students, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
Application deadline: 30 May 2020
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Congrats to
@LeslieHeld
for receiving an
@FWOVlaanderen
PhD scholarship!! 🥳 Looking forward to working with you on this exciting project on how we learn to arbitrate between different RL strategies!
📢 Nieuwe lichting van 490 FWO-aspiranten aan de slag. Je kan de resultaten raadplegen via 👉🏽
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For the first time in a very long time, I managed to complete enough small tasks to make the scroll bar disappear on my to-do list, and I've been proudly looking at it all day.
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Looking forward to
#ESCoP2022
! I hope you’ll like some of our ongoing work:
@cog_senoussi
will talk on Tuesday in the 1st Cog Control Session on why pushing the clutch versus shifting gears might be a good analogy for understanding shifts in theta amplitude versus frequency
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About a year ago, we wondered whether there were publicly available datasets with conflict tasks and reinforcement learning tasks, to study whether the speed with which we update control settings would be related to the learning rate with which we update action values in RL (1/2)
Does someone know of a freely available dataset where the same participants performed both a simple conflict task (e.g., Stroop, Flanker, Prime-Probe...) and a simple N-armed bandit (with probabilistic reward contingencies) in separate sessions?
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Our new study suggesting that adults with more self-reported autistic traits show a heightened preference for predictability across three different tasks (music preference task, perceptual fluency task, and gambling task) (thanks Judith Goris!):
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We had fun discussing this interesting paper by
@yael_niv
in our JC. Great pts about causal manipulations! Also, it finally gave me an answer to my son's long-standing question what my super-power is (design experiments that manipulate brain processes). He was not impressed, tho.
Absolute 🔥 from
@yael_niv
:
"Behavioral, rather than neuroscientific research, is essential for understanding the brain, contrary to the opinion of prominent funding bodies and scientific journals, who erroneously place neural data on a pedestal"
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My partner just asked me a few times where the "head cancelling noisephones" are, and now I can't stop thinking how that would look like.
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Three weeks into the quarantine, and I'm starting to lose arguments with my 3yo. He just convinced me the washing machine needs washing too, after he covered it with laundry detergent.
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Really excited about this new study where
@LeslieHeld
investigated whether and how people change control strategies if you selectively reinforce incongruent versus congruent trials!
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New preprint: "Learning when to learn: Context-specific instruction encoding". People use contextual features in their environment to determine how fast and how strong new task instructions should be encoded.
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We have a new paper out for people (like me) who thought it would be easy to improve performance when you’re told the next Stroop trial will be congruent or incongruent
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@summerfieldlab
@ISTAustria
@SaxeLab
@timoflesch
@worldwideneuro
I was wondering if there's also a recording available? My daughter and I very much liked the first part but then she started disagreeing and I could no longer follow.
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Check out Judith Goris' presentation on "predictive coding during early auditory perception in autism" for
@BapSciences
2020: : two EEG studies where we (mostly Judith!) tested recent predictive coding theories as put forward by
@sandervdc
and
@beckyneuro
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Excited about this preprint on an interesting study we ran 5 years ago: We stimulated people's motor cortex every time they saw, e.g., the color blue, and show how it conflicts with performance on an irrelevant task. Thanks
@LeslieHeld
for analyzing, modeling & writing this up!
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Congrats to Pieter Van Dessel (
@Pieter_vd
) for winning the first "Early Career Award" by the Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS)! Also, great initiative from BAPS to support ECRs with awards like this!
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Thanks a lot to
@emmafnki
,
@NanneKukkonen
,
@BiestMathias
,
@AaronVandendae1
,
@pruteannicoleta
, Esin, Samuel, Tabitha, Roos, and Jonas for organizing a great, fun online department teambuilding during these weird times, with quarantine bingo and a personnel video quiz!
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I loved my six-month internship with Birgit Stürmer. She's an all-round great scientist and mentor. She really motivated and encouraged me to pursue a career in academia (even years after my internship).
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New preprint (most work by Judith Goris!): People usually show a larger prediction error to a deviant tone during early auditory processing, when these deviant and standard tones are the same as in the first block, but the autism group did not show this primacy bias
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Happy to share that we just released a preprint on this study together with
@nickvasta94
, showing that learning rates in reinforcement learning tasks indeed correlated with the time scale of control measure first proposed by Aben and
@evdbussc
(2/2)
Is there a shared time scale mechanism between cognitive control and reinforcement learning paradigms? In our new preprint, together with
@ShengjieXu0813
, Tom Verguts and
@sebraem
, we tried to answer this question: . (1/6)
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Really great work from
@ivan_ivanchei
! We tried to address inconsistencies between earlier findings from us and others, in an incremental manner. To me, this really felt like science at its best and most exciting!
Our paper with
@sebraem
,
@luc_vermeylen
&
@WNotebaert
on how successful conflict resolution counteracts negative affect triggered by conflicts is online!
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My 3yo just looked at me with contempt and ridicule, after I suggested his toy lawnmower could fly. This was after he ate my toy fish with his lawnmower and said it now needs to brush its teeth with the giraffe. I guess we're both still learning.
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!
@judith_goris
is on twitter! Now I can finally tag her when tweeting about our (mostly her) autism work 😊! Also, congrats again on your great PhD defense last month🎉! Consider following her if you're interested in predictive coding, learning and decision-making in autism!
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Just read the final chapter on "Higher mental processes" of the book "Cognitive Psychology" by Ulric Neisser (1967) (thanks Frederick Verbruggen for recommending!). Wow, hard to believe this was written half a decade ago:
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"providing values-based training (e.g., teaching children about the value of using control in different situations) may have a broader impact on executive function than practicing lab tasks designed to improve executive-function components"
Looking for some light reading during the pandemic? Look no further! Read my new paper 'Rethinking Executive Function and its Development', finally out in Perspectives!
@PsychScience
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Check out
@ShengjieXu0813
's preprint on why you might be more flexible in the supermarket versus airport!
Super thrilled to anounance a new (also my first) preprint with Tom Verguts, Jonas Simoens, &
@sebraem
where we asked the question: Can being in one or the other environment trigger different levels of cognitive flexibility?
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Does someone know of a freely available dataset where the same participants performed both a simple conflict task (e.g., Stroop, Flanker, Prime-Probe...) and a simple N-armed bandit (with probabilistic reward contingencies) in separate sessions?
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The name seems to suggest I can't "imagine" or fantasize. I feel like I can. I can bring up memories of events, spatial maps, sounds, and movements. And I can think about visual images, I just cannot see them. It's like I have the DVDs, but cannot project them (2/2)
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I had interesting discussions on this past few days. Clearly, people differ in what (we think) we use for imagination. It seems like a difficult, but interesting thing to study. Not sure if the aphantasia-label helps, though. I'll stick to Stroop and reward learning for now 🙂
Strange to admit as a cognitive scientist, but I only just found out that when people say they imagine something, it's not proverbial, they can actually "see" something, and I seem to have what's called aphantasia. Not sure if I like the name (1/2)
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Would be great to have a similar resource for URM scientists in Europe going around. Is someone already doing this? If not, we can put one together.
Inspired by other faculty throughout the country who are offering their mentorship to black scientists, I’ve created a Google spreadsheet with a list of folks so far I’ve seen on Twitter.
I hope this will be a useful resource for
#blackinSTEM
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Interesting paper by Eder & Dignath on the century-old, early work of Kurt Lewin and its relation to current research on associative learning, cognitive maps, and instruction-based learning:
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Just had a journal club on this interesting paper. I really liked the timely work it discusses, and the discussion on how to understand interactions between reinforcement learning and executive functions (EF). It also reminded me of how vague the term "EF" is, and that (1/2)
Check out
@milenamr7
's new preprint! The Role of Executive Function in Shaping Reinforcement Learning
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@JoeyDunsmoor
Same! In hindsight, I should have registered for
#CNS2020
. Turns out our 3yo likes looking at color-coded matrices and brain images, and our baby calms down when hearing conference talks.
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@YukoMunakata1
This is very interesting work! I noticed you already cite the 2020 paper by
@sabine_doebel
. Although a bit broader, I really liked this book by
@CeliaHeyes
: , and we wrote a (I think relevant) commentary on executive functions here:
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@Echo_QianY
It was a great defense and thesis, and I had fun discussing those questions with you, too! It looked like intrinsic motivation to me :-)
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@ESCoP_news
It was a surreal but amazing experience to receive this award and be invited to give this lecture. Importantly, this couldn't have happened without being nominated in the first place (by my former PhD and postdoc supervisors
@WNotebaert
and
#MarcelBrass
)!
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.
@luc_vermeylen
will talk on Tuesday in the 2nd Cog Control Session on why more than a 100 people really did not like doing a flanker task for two hours, and the different ways they disliked it related to different cognitive processes
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"It is a shame that at the moment most of us who enjoy this guidance do so as a matter of luck – based on who trained us or supervised our work. It might take a village to raise a psychologist, but luckily the village is already there, and there’s a lot it can do to help."
What can the psychology community do to help early career researchers? In this piece for
@psychmag
I reflect on some of the things I've learned about science and careers as ECR rep for
@ExpPsychSoc
. Thanks too to
@janerebecca_c
,
@utafrith
&
@itschekkers
for sharing their thoughts
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Finally,
@ShengjieXu0813
will present a poster in the 3rd poster session on why knowing that you’re at the airport or the supermarket, can help you with being better prepared to switch between tasks...
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I’m excited about these findings because they are my first steps into the RL literature (we have more in the pipeline), so I hope we're doing it right and our findings can be of value to the field.
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@StePalminteri
Reminds me of this paper: "Behaviourism? Cognitive theory? Humanistic psychology? To Hull with them all."
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@NeuroLuyckx
Probably. My three-year-old just recovered from his sore throat last night, and wanted to tell me all about it... at 3 am 🙃
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What are common ways to simulate a primacy effect in reinforcement learning (i.e., contingencies learned in the beginning are harder to unlearn/easier to relearn)? Exponentially decaying learning rates work well in our case, but we're new to the literature on this.
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.
@NanneKukkonen
’s work, on the efficiency of different difficulty and reward cues across different tasks and prediction horizons, will be presented in Wednesday’s exciting symposium on cognitive effort
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@sabine_doebel
@PsychScience
We just had a journal club on it about an hour ago, and really liked it! We were a bit unsure as to how you see the remaining generalizable/latent processes you mention, but definitely agree with the message for training studies and development!
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.
@ivan_ivanchei
will also talk on Tuesday in the 2nd Cog Control Session on why making people like cognitive conflict seems challenging, but can result in changes to how they adapt to cognitive conflict
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Humans can transform new task instructions into action-ready representations that can be called upon in a reflex-like manner (), often referred to as “prepared reflexes”. As shown by Dorit Wenke,
@NMeiran
,
@TheColeLab
,
@EgnerLab
and others. (2/6)
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.
@LeslieHeld
will present a poster in the 1st poster session on what we believe is first proof that you can selectively reinforce conflict processing above and beyond the effects of rewarding individual items
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@profcikara
Actually, now that I listened to it again I realize it does both for me: first calms me down and then pumps me up
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There's more! Also a great symposium on Thursday on task switching, where
@luc_vermeylen
will give a second talk on whether this could be something people enjoy? (not really), and
@SamVerschooren
will present his work on how attention is more easily drawn inward than outward
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@criticalneuro
@avdjeugd
No problem! I value this small exchange of thoughts more than my original tweet. And I'm sure Ann didn't mean to spread fatalism either, just illustrating the seriousness of the problem (which I fear is still less recognized in European versus North American academia).
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@BogaertsLouisa
@GhentCCN
@FWOVlaanderen
@ResearchUGent
Congratulations Louisa!! 🎉🥳🤩 This is wonderful news!!
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In our reading of the literature, it seemed that many great studies show that more volatile environments lead to a higher learning rate, but none really show that people also learn about these environment-sensitive learning rates.
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Mengqiao Chai will also present a poster in the 1st poster session on how the small likelihood of expecting a task switch (10% vs. 0%) substantially changes the way we prepare for tasks
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@raquel_e_london
I can extract the info I need and know *where* different things are or should go, I just don't see them. This picture displays it well for me:
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@CharlotteEben
You mean events and maps? Me neither, I don't see them. If I think about walking through my late grandmother's house, I can imagine hearing the old clock, remember conversations we had, and count my steps as I walk through the house, but I don't see anything, like I'm blindfolded
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@sabine_doebel
I honestly didn't know until last Sunday that people could actually do that🙃. Even now, the idea sounds wild to me, like I'd be hallucinating or wearing augmented reality glasses (although I understand this type of visualisation is probably not as vivid).
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I think it can be confusing when we label executive functions as "executive", as they can also be seen as mental tools or gadgets that work in purpose of, or are directed by, (model-based) reinforcement learning. (2/2)
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I especially like the part about "executive functions" being processes that are learned in and of themselves (rather than cognitive instincts), this relates well to
@CeliaHeyes
' theory on cognitive gadgets (and our commentary)
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@profcikara
I mostly need to calm down before giving a talk, and have been using this song for many years now (also before my exams when I was a student):
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@froemero1
@unibirmingham
@UoB_SoP
@TheCHBH
@LES_UniBham
Congratulations Romy!! That's great news!! That array just got yet more impressive.
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@OomenDanna
@JRWiersema
@CraccoEmiel
@RSiugzdaite
@ljuba_pi
@JellinaP
@JoshuaEayrs
Congrats! It was a great defense!
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@szorowi1
Many thanks! What a great dataset/resource. This one looks perfect for our purposes! (and thanks
@Ian_Eisenberg
,
@zeynepenkavi
,
@russpoldrack
, et al. of course!)
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@NogaCohen2
@NMeiran
Oh I've wondered about that a lot as well 🤷♂️. I always assumed they referred to the same processes, and the usage of one term vs the other has more to do with the background of the researcher (indiv diff & developmental vs. cog psy).
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@Pop_Watson
@NogaCohen2
@ProfNDerakshan
@OkonSinger
@UofHaifa
@IBBRCHaifa
I showed data from our lab that I think is consistent with this idea (e.g., we review some older data here: and here: , or this one by
@EgnerLab
& Yu-Chin Chiu: ).
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@ralfer
@ivan_ivanchei
@luc_vermeylen
@WNotebaert
That will mostly depend on your intial outcome expectancy after the first paragraph
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@JulieLinJi
@LaurenFink_PhD
Not so much smells. But maybe bodiliy sensations and definitely sounds. Ultimately this is obviously very subjective, but I guess I'd say the experience is almost like hearing when thinking of a sound. In contrast, I'd never say I saw something when thinking of an image.
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@pastotter
@CraccoEmiel
Same here! It seems like I'm lacking the voluntary control to do it when I'm awake.
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Our fourth and final experiment suggests that we might be able to overwrite this reflex by offering a new instruction. If you’re now told to “hit the right button when you see a seal”, the reflex for pony might disappear. (5/6)
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we showed that cueing conflict () or task novelty () does not work, but training conflict processing by reinforcement () or switch readiness by associative learning does (). (3/3)
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@brain_apps
I guess I have to admit my laptop is currently hooked up to a bigger monitor at the office, and I refuse to unplug it
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@kimberlychiew
@amy_belfi
@TarazLee
@BrookeMacnamara
Congratulations Kim! That's great news and well-deserved! 🥳
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@NeuroPolarbear
My 4yo and I love Du iz tak by Carson Ellis. It's a simple story but with beautiful drawings and in a made-up language.
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(3) We found an echo of these environment-sensitive learning rates in an unannounced test phase, where the environments no longer differed in volatility
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