Roshan Cools
Roshan Cools
Radboud University
Dopamine and the adaptive tuning of behavioral strategy
Virtual Talk
https://nyu.zoom.us/j/96656211185
Abstract:
The invigoration of goal-directed behavior requires cognitive effort. However, cognitive effort should be
recruited in an environment-specific manner, so that it is tuned flexibly to the demands of the current
environment. For example, effortful control is valuable only when the environment controllable, that is,
when our actions matter. How does our brain know whether our actions matter? Given its role in
reinforcement learning, the dopamine system is well positioned to regulate such environment-specific
adaptive tuning of goal-directed behavior. In this talk, I will highlight an alternative route by which
dopamine can adapt behavior to our environment. Specifically, I will review evidence from studies with
model-informed pupillometry and neuroimaging that indicates that the brain computes the
controllability of the environment by tracking its state-action-outcome transition structure independent
of reinforcement rate. Moreover, preliminary results from work with people with Parkinson’s disease
raise the hypothesis that this value-free inferential computation of controllability implicates dopamine.
Thus dopamine might adaptively tune goal-directed behavior to our rapidly changing environment by
boosting the inference of environmental controllability.
Speaker Bio:
Roshan Cools is Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour and
Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry at the Radboud University Medical Center. She is an expert in
the chemical neuromodulation of human cognition and motivation. Her PhD is from the University of
Cambridge (UK), where she held Royal Society research fellowships and did a postdoc at the Helen Wills
Neuroscience Institute at UC Berkeley. At the Donders, she steers an active research group
(www.roshancools.com), combining psychopharmacology, fMRI, chemical PET imaging, computational
cognitive modelling, neurostimulation and patient work to unravel how behavioural control strategies
are adaptively tuned to our constantly changing environment, modulated by the major ascending
neuromodulators, including dopamine, serotonin and noradrenaline. She holds a Horizon Europe ERC
Advanced grant, and is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).