Senne Braem (UGent): "The affective evaluation of cognitive control"

Monday 10 Nov 2025, 14:00 → 15:00 Europe/Brussels

B-30/0-000 - Big meeting room (CRC)

We often get the advice to either “use our brain” or “follow our heart.” This enduring distinction between cognition and emotion is deeply embedded in everyday life and has long fascinated philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In this talk, I will present research grounded in reinforcement learning frameworks that emphasize shared, rather than separate, neural processes of cognition and emotion, focusing on the affective signatures of cognitive control. Using behavioral, fMRI, EEG, and pupillometry measures, we show how effortful control is often experienced as aversive (“thinking hurts”), yet successfully overcoming these demands can be rewarding and reshape how we evaluate cognitive effort. In more recent work, we further tried to disentangle the evaluation and allocation of cognitive control, revealing distinct roles for subcortical and cingulo-striatal circuits in encoding control and reward signals. Finally, I will present work that tries to tap into the dynamic adjustments in metacognitive experiences such as effort, frustration, and fatigue, and how they can be understood as important learning signals for rational adaptations in control. Together, these findings suggest that our affective and motivational experiences of control are not mere byproducts, but fundamental components of adaptive cognitive regulation.

BIO: Senne Braem is an associate professor at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Ghent University, Belgium. Senne’s research focuses on the interactions between cognitive control (or “executive functions”) and different forms of learning, such as reinforcement learning, associative learning, fear conditioning, or learning via instructions. Together with his team (https://users.ugent.be/~sbraem/), they study the learning of these arguably higher-order functions through designing and using different behavioral paradigms, sometimes combined with neuroimaging methods or computational modelling. Senne’s work has also tried to study the relevance of these functions for cognitive training and better understanding different clinical conditions, primarily autism. His research has been funded by the BOF Special Research Funds, the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO), and the European Research Council (ERC).

Teams Link