The Cognitive Control of Goal-Directed Action: How Predictive Learning Affects Choice

Abstract

The cognitive control of action reflects our ability to extract and encode causal relationships from the environment to guide the choice between different courses of action. To investigate this process, at both a psychological and a neural level, we have adopted a model of cognitive control in animals in which the influence of predictive learning on action selection is assessed in an instrumental choice situation: the Pavlovian-instrumental transfer paradigm. Over several years, we have been systematically investigating the core neural systems and cellular circuits that mediate this transfer effect. Here, I describe the background to this research project and some recent findings.