Associative learning and cognitive control

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The project intends to explore how accidents and errors in decision-making occur when people are operating on ‘auto-pilot’. Adapting our behaviour to changing environmental demands is fundamental to our survival. However, often it requires deliberate cognitive control to override previously learned, but no longer appropriate, associations between cues in the environment and our responses. This project plans to use manipulations of cognitive control over simple associative learning, in conjunction with neurophysiological investigations of neuronal excitability in motor cortex, to understand how well-learned responses are prepared in the presence of cues that signal those responses; how these responses are brought under cognitive control when response requirements change; and what happens to behaviour when that control is impaired. This knowledge may help us to design environments in which the probability of errors is minimised.