Tobias Egner
Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Overview
My goal is to understand how humans produce purposeful, adaptive behavior. The main ingredient for adaptive behavior, in all animals, is memory: we understand the world around us by matching the flow of incoming sensory information to previous experience. Importantly, by retrieving past episodes that resemble our present situation, we can predict what is likely to happen next, thus anticipating forthcoming stimuli and advantageous responses learned from past outcomes. Hence, I am interested in how the brain generates predictions about the world. However, unlike many other animals, humans can also produce adaptive behavior that runs counter to our learning history. For instance, we are able to switch from life-long driving on the right side of the road to driving on the left side during a trip to the UK. This capacity to use contextual information (“I’m in London”) to override habitual responses in favor of temporarily more goal-conducive actions is referred to as “cognitive control”, and it greatly enhances the flexibility of human behavior. Cognitive control requires the formation of temporary memory ensembles that link responses to stimuli in novel ways; this is often referred to as a “working memory”, and conceptualized as strategically attending to a select set of currently task-relevant representations. However, the mechanisms that govern this interplay between attention and memory remain poorly understood; our research aims to improve this situation. In my lab, we address the above questions using behavioral, computational, neuroimaging (e.g., fMRI) and neuro-stimulation (TMS) techniques.
Selected Grants
Mechanisms Regulating Complex Social Behavior awarded by University of Pennsylvania (Co Investigator). 2016 to 2026
Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Meta-Flexibility awarded by National Institutes of Health (Principal Investigator). 2019 to 2024
Cognitive and neural mechanisms of working memory gating and updating. Control over declarative and procedural working memory. awarded by US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (Principal Investigator). 2017 to 2022
A High-Performance 3T MRI for Brain Imaging awarded by National Institutes of Health (Minor User). 2021 to 2022
Characterizing Neural Mechanisms of Cognitive Control awarded by National Institutes of Health (Principal Investigator). 2010 to 2019
Thrust 1: Biophysical Modeling of Satisficing Control Strategies as Derived from Quantification of Primate Brain Activity and Psychophysics awarded by Office of Naval Research (Co-Principal Investigator). 2013 to 2018
Expectation and Attention in Visual Cognition awarded by National Institutes of Health (Principal Investigator). 2013 to 2018
A Compute Cluster for Brain Imaging and Analysis awarded by National Institutes of Health (Major User). 2016 to 2017
Effects of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation on Neurons in Behaving Primates awarded by National Institutes of Health (Co Investigator). 2012 to 2014
Precision Targeting of fMRI-Guided TMS Using a Robotic Arm System awarded by National Institutes of Health (Investigator). 2010 to 2011
Egner, Tobias. The Wiley Handbook of Cognitive Control. Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
Egner, T. “Brain Mapping of Control Processes.” Brain Mapping: An Encyclopedic Reference, vol. 2, 2015, pp. 581–87. Scopus, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-397025-1.00049-X. Full Text
Reeck, C., and T. Egner. “Interactions between Attention and Emotion.” Brain Mapping: An Encyclopedic Reference, vol. 3, 2015, pp. 269–74. Scopus, doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-397025-1.00243-8. Full Text
George, Nithin, and Tobias Egner. “Stimulus variability and task relevance modulate binding-learning.” Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, vol. 84, no. 4, May 2022, pp. 1151–66. Epmc, doi:10.3758/s13414-021-02338-6. Full Text
Wen, Tanya, and Tobias Egner. “Retrieval context determines whether event boundaries impair or enhance temporal order memory.” Cognition, vol. 225, Apr. 2022, p. 105145. Epmc, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105145. Full Text
Bejjani, Christina, et al. “Distinct but correlated latent factors support the regulation of learned conflict-control and task-switching.” Cognitive Psychology, vol. 135, Apr. 2022, p. 101474. Epmc, doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2022.101474. Full Text
Wang, Yuxi Candice, and Tobias Egner. “Switching task sets creates event boundaries in memory.” Cognition, vol. 221, Apr. 2022, p. 104992. Epmc, doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104992. Full Text
Gjorgieva, Eva, and Tobias Egner. “Learning from mistakes: Incidental encoding reveals a time-dependent enhancement of posterror target processing.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. General, vol. 151, no. 3, Mar. 2022, pp. 718–30. Epmc, doi:10.1037/xge0001105. Full Text
Siqi-Liu, Audrey, et al. “Neural Dynamics of Context-sensitive Adjustments in Cognitive Flexibility.” J Cogn Neurosci, vol. 34, no. 3, Feb. 2022, pp. 480–94. Pubmed, doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01813. Full Text
Bejjani, Christina, et al. “Minimal impact of consolidation on learned switch-readiness.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 47, no. 10, Oct. 2021, pp. 1622–37. Epmc, doi:10.1037/xlm0001074. Full Text
Brosowsky, Nicholaus P., and Tobias Egner. “Appealing to the cognitive miser: Using demand avoidance to modulate cognitive flexibility in cued and voluntary task switching.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance, vol. 47, no. 10, Oct. 2021, pp. 1329–47. Epmc, doi:10.1037/xhp0000942. Full Text
Bejjani, Christina, and Tobias Egner. “Evaluating the learning of stimulus-control associations through incidental memory of reinforcement events.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 47, no. 10, Oct. 2021, pp. 1599–621. Epmc, doi:10.1037/xlm0001058. Full Text
Bugg, Julie M., and Tobias Egner. “The many faces of learning-guided cognitive control.” Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 47, no. 10, Oct. 2021, pp. 1547–49. Epmc, doi:10.1037/xlm0001075. Full Text
Pages
Dowd, E. W., et al. “Probability of guessing, not precision, changes in mixture models of visual working memory during cognitive control of attentional guidance.” Visual Cognition, vol. 22, no. 8, 2014, pp. 1027–30. Scopus, doi:10.1080/13506285.2014.960669. Full Text
Torres-Quesada, Maryem, et al. “DISSOCIABLE NEURAL MECHANISMS MEDIATE PROACTIVE CONTROL OVER EMOTIONAL VS. NON-EMOTIONAL CONFLICT.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT PRESS, 2013, pp. 219–219.
Braem, Senne, et al. “AFFECTIVE MODULATION OF COGNITIVE CONTROL VARIES WITH PERFORMANCE-CONTINGENCY.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT PRESS, 2013, pp. 37–37.
Kiyonaga, Anastasia, and Tobias Egner. “RESOURCE-SHARING BETWEEN INTERNAL MAINTENANCE AND EXTERNAL SELECTION UNDERLIES THE CAPTURE OF ATTENTION BY WORKING MEMORY CONTENT.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT PRESS, 2013, pp. 133–133.
Jiang, Jiefeng, et al. “ATTENTION AMPLIFIES OR SUPPRESSES NEURAL PREDICTION ERROR RESPONSES IN A REGIONALLY SPECIFIC MANNER.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, MIT PRESS, 2013, pp. 209–209.
Egner, Tobias. “Conflict-driven cognitive control mechanisms in the human brain.” Neuroscience Research, vol. 65, Elsevier BV, 2009, pp. S30–S30. Crossref, doi:10.1016/j.neures.2009.09.1664. Full Text