Join us for a hybrid event featuring Dr. Catherine Hartley, Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University. This event will be held in-person in the Herklotz Conference Center and virtually via Zoom.

Event is jointly sponsored with the Conte Center@UCI.

Interactive development of reinforcement learning and episodic memory

Highlighting the fundamentally interactive nature of learning and memory, recent studies in adults have demonstrated that the same quantitative learning signals that inform value computation during reinforcement learning also modulate how information is prioritized and represented in episodic memory. While both reinforcement learning and episodic memory processes exhibit qualitative shifts from childhood to adulthood, how the interactions between these neurocognitive systems might change over development remains virtually unexplored. In this talk, I will present studies that leverage computational modeling to characterize age-related shifts in how reinforcement learning computations influence the content and granularity of memory, and how memory, in turn, informs value-based choices. I will discuss how these processes may support adaptive behavior at different developmental stages.