Patryk Laurent

• Ph.D. in Neuroscience
• Managing Director at DMGT plc

Feedback about our choices is a crucial part of how we gather information and learn from our environment. It provides key information about decision experiences that can be used to optimize future choices. However, our understanding of the processes through which feedback translates into improved decision-making is lacking. Using neuroimaging (fMRI...

Understanding visual reality involves acquiring common-sense knowledge about countless regularities in the visual world, e.g., how illumination alters the appearance of objects in a scene, and how motion changes their apparent spatial relationship. These regularities are hard to label for training supervised machine learning algorithms; consequentl...

Prior research has shown that the perception of degraded speech is influenced by within sentence meaning and recruits one or more components of a frontal–temporal–parietal network. The goal of the current study is to examine whether the overall conceptual meaning of a sentence, made up of one set of words, influences the perception of a second acou...

Goal-directed and stimulus-driven factors determine attentional priority through a well defined dorsal frontal-parietal and ventral temporal-parietal network of brain regions, respectively. Recent evidence demonstrates that reward-related stimuli also have high attentional priority, independent of their physical salience and goal-relevance. The neu...

Visual attention has long been known to be drawn to stimuli that are physically salient or congruent with task-specific goals. Several recent studies have shown that attention is also captured by stimuli that are neither salient nor task relevant, but that are rendered in a colour that has previously been associated with reward. We investigated whe...

Human speech perception rapidly adapts to maintain comprehension under adverse listening conditions. For example, with exposure listeners can adapt to heavily accented speech produced by a non-native speaker. Outside the domain of speech perception, adaptive changes in sensory and motor processing have been attributed to cerebellar functions. The p...

Goal-driven and stimulus-driven factors interact to determine the attentional priority of stimuli. A wealth of research demonstrates that goal-driven attention is subserved by a frontal-parietal network of brain regions, and stimulus-driven attention by a temporal-parietal network. Recently, we showed that stimuli previously associated with reward...

Attention selects stimuli for perceptual and cognitive processing according to an adaptive selection schedule. It has long been known that attention selects stimuli that are task relevant or perceptually salient. Recent evidence has shown that stimuli previously associated with reward persistently capture attention involuntarily, even when they are...

Decision-making often requires taking into consideration immediate gains as well as delayed rewards. Studies of behavior have established that anticipated rewards are discounted according to a decreasing hyperbolic function. Although mathematical explanations for reward delay discounting have been offered, little has been proposed in terms of neura...

It has long been known that the control of attention in visual search depends both on voluntary, top-down deployment according to context-specific goals, and on involuntary, stimulus-driven capture based on the physical conspicuity of perceptual objects. Recent evidence suggests that pairing target stimuli with reward can modulate the voluntary dep...

The human ability to flexibly adapt to novel circumstances is extraordinary. Perhaps the most illustrative, yet underappreciated, form of this cognitive flexibility is rapid instructed task learning (RITL)-the ability to rapidly reconfigure our minds to perform new tasks from instructions. This ability is important for everyday life (e.g., learning...

It is well-established that visual attention is guided by the physical salience of stimuli and by their congruence with ongoing goals. More recently we have also shown that attention can be captured by stimuli that are neither salient nor goal-related, but that possess a feature (namely, a particular color) that has been previously associated with...

Attention is the mechanism by which important or salient stimuli are selected for perceptual and cognitive processing. Which stimuli are attended has important implications for effective goal-directed behaviour, survival, and well-being. A growing body of evidence suggests that reward-predicting stimuli capture attention involuntarily. In previous...

Visual attention is captured by physically salient stimuli (termed salience-based attentional capture), and by otherwise task-irrelevant stimuli that contain goal-related features (termed contingent attentional capture). Recently, we reported that physically nonsalient stimuli associated with value through reward learning also capture attention inv...

Computational models of eye-movement control during reading provide precise quantitative descriptions of the perceptual, cognitive,and motoric processing that guide readers′ eyes, but are based on numerous equivocal a priori theoretical assumptions. This article describes an alternative approach to understanding eye-movement control: Using reinforc...

Attention selects which aspects of sensory input are brought to awareness. To promote survival and well-being, attention prioritizes stimuli both voluntarily, according to context-specific goals (e.g., searching for car keys), and involuntarily, through attentional capture driven by physical salience (e.g., looking toward a sudden noise). Valuable...

Recent attempts to map reward-based learning models, like reinforcement learning, to the brain are based on the observation that phasic increases and decreases in the spiking of dopamine-releasing neurons signal differences between predicted and received reward. However, this reward-prediction error is only one of several signals communicated by th...

This paper presents an experiment investigating attention allocation in four tasks requiring varied degrees of lexical processing of 1-4 simultaneously displayed words. Response times and eye movements were only modestly affected by the number of words in an asterisk-detection task but increased markedly with the number of words in letter-detection...

The eye movements of skilled readers are typically very regular (K. Rayner, 1998). This regularity may arise as a result of the perceptual, cognitive, and motor limitations of the reader (e.g., limited visual acuity) and the inherent constraints of the task (e.g., identifying the words in their correct order). To examine this hypothesis, reinforcem...

This paper quantifies the time shifting of neuronal codes in a sparse, randomly connected neural network model of hippocampal region CA3. As this network is trained to learn a sequence, the neurons that encode portions of this sequence characteristically fire earlier and earlier over the course of training. Here we systematically investigate the ef...