CHBH Seminar Series: Prof Sam McDougle

CHBH Seminars are free to attend and are open to all, both within and outside the University. Please register your interest to attend using the link above.

We are pleased to announce that the CHBH will welcome Prof Sam McDougle, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Yale University, to present a CHBH Seminar on his research, taking place on Friday, 20th November, 15:00-16:00 GMT. 

If you wish to attend, you can register your interest using the link above. 
To arrange a 1:1 meeting with Prof McDougle on the day, please contact us. 

Strategic processes in human motor skill learning

How do we “get off the ground” at the start of the learning curve? Recent research has highlighted the important role of top-down cognitive strategies in procedural learning, showing that motor skills transcend the strong taxonomic divide between declarative and non-declarative memory systems. Here I give a brief summary of this work and focus on a recent set of experiments aimed at elucidating different strategies people use to rapidly improve their performance on a simple motor skill. I demonstrate dissociable parametric and discrete motor planning representations and relate those to qualitative shifts in motor skill during early learning. Neural implications are discussed, including preliminary data on a role for the cerebellum in abstract planning.

Biography

Sam McDougle is an Assistant Professor of psychology at Yale University, and is program faculty in Yale’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program and Cognitive Science Program. Sam earned a PhD in Psychology & Neuroscience from Princeton University in 2018, and a Bachelor’s degree in Neuroscience & Behaviour from Vassar College in 2008. Before coming to Yale, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. His research is focused on the psychological and neural mechanism of human skill learning, using tools including psychophysics, machine learning, and functional neuroimaging.

Sam McDougle's Twitter
Lab Website

If you wish to attend, you can register your interest using the link above.

CHBH Seminars are free to attend and are open to all, both within and outside the University. Please register your interest to attend using the link above.