CEN Talk: Bernhard Hommel, The pros and cons of a noisy brain: Recent developments

Traditional approaches to decision-making and action control assume the existence of aunitary control system that struggles with and serves to overcome misleading actiontendencies. I present a metacontrol model that considers control as envisioned by thetraditional model as only one side of the coin (the persistence side) that is useful forsome tasks, whereas other tasks call for flexibility—the other side of the control coin. Here, I shall focus on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the balancing andimplementation of metacontrol policies and discuss evidence from our lab suggestingthat metacontrol operates by up- or down-regulating cortical variability and noise (asindicated by aperiodic EEG activity) to bias processing and response selection inparticular towards flexibility and persistence, respectively.

Bio: Bernhard Hommel is full professor of psychology at the Shandong Normal University in Jinan, China. Until 2022, he held the chair of “General Psychology” at Leiden University since 1999, after having worked as senior researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychological Research. He is a member and senator of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina) and the Secretary of the International Association for the Study of Attention and Performance. His research focuses on cognitive, computational, developmental, social, and neurochemical mechanisms of human and robotic attention and action control, and the role of consciousness therein. Recent work also addresses the role of emotion, creativity, and religion in human cognition, and mechanisms underlying personality and psychopathology. He also publishes general-audience books that apply psychological and neuroscientific insights to politics.

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