Dr. Samuel Gershman

Biography

Samuel Gershman is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, specializing in Computational Cognitive Neuroscience. His research is aimed at understanding how brains acquire richly structured knowledge from their environments, and how this knowledge facilitates learning and prediction of rewards. The Gershman lab employs a combination of behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, and computational techniques to address these questions. One major focus of their research involves investigating how both humans and animals can discover hidden states that underlie observations and represent these states. These states often correspond to complex data structures, such as graphs, grammars, and programs, which significantly constrain how agents can infer actions that lead to rewards. Another aspect of his research is to explore the interactions between different learning systems within the brain. Evidence hints at the existence of two main systems: a goal-directed system that builds an explicit model of the environment and a habitual system that learns state-action response rules, where distinct neural pathways compete in controlling behavior while also cooperating in decision-making processes.

Research Interests

Experience