David Badre

About

David Badre is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Cognitive & Psychological Sciences at Brown University and is affiliated with the Carney Institute for Brain Science. His professional role involves leading research efforts in cognitive and psychological sciences, with a focus on understanding the neural and computational mechanisms underlying flexible human cognition. As the Principal Investigator of the Badre Lab, he oversees a team of investigators, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and research assistants who study various aspects of cognitive control, working memory, learning, and decision-making. The lab employs a range of methodologies including behavioral experiments, functional MRI, computational modeling, and machine learning to investigate how the brain supports flexible cognition, particularly through representations in the prefrontal cortex. David Badre's leadership in this interdisciplinary research environment contributes to advancing knowledge about the neural basis of cognitive flexibility and control processes.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Cognitive psychology
• Psychology
• Machine Learning
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive science
• Information Retrieval
• Human–computer interaction
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• The dimensionality of neural representations for control

  Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences · 2020 · 199 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Cognitive control allows us to think and behave flexibly based on our context and goals. At the heart of theories of cognitive control is a control representation that enables the same input to produce different outputs contingent on contextual factors. In this review, we focus on an important property of the control representation’s neural code: its representational dimensionality. Dimensionality of a neural representation balances a basic separability/generalizability trade-off in neural compu…

  DOI

• Neural representation of abstract task structure during generalization

  eLife · 2021 · 85 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Cognitive models in psychology and neuroscience widely assume that the human brain maintains an abstract representation of tasks. This assumption is fundamental to theories explaining how we learn quickly, think creatively, and act flexibly. However, neural evidence for a verifiably generative abstract task representation has been lacking. Here, we report an experimental paradigm that requires forming such a representation to act adaptively in novel conditions without feedback. Using functional…

  DOI

• Cognitive Control

  Annual Review of Psychology · 2024-10-08 · 57 citations

  reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Humans and other primates have a remarkable ability to perform a wide range of tasks and behaviors, even novel ones, in order to achieve their goals. Further, they are able to shift flexibly among these behaviors as the contexts demand. Cognitive control is the function at the base of this remarkable behavioral generativity and flexibility. The present review provides a survey of current research on cognitive control focusing on two of its primary features within a control systems framework: ( a…

  PublisherDOI

• A Virtual Reality Memory Palace Variant Aids Knowledge Retrieval from Scholarly Articles

  IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics · 2020 · 30 citations

  We present exploratory research of virtual reality techniques and mnemonic devices to assist in retrieving knowledge from scholarly articles. We used abstracts of scientific publications to represent knowledge in scholarly articles; participants were asked to read, remember, and retrieve knowledge from a set of abstracts. We conducted an experiment to compare participants' recall and recognition performance in three different conditions: a control condition without a pre-specified strategy to te…

  PublisherDOI

• A rapid theta network mechanism for flexible information encoding

  Nature Communications · 2023-05-19 · 27 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Flexible behavior requires gating mechanisms that encode only task-relevant information in working memory. Extant literature supports a theoretical division of labor whereby lateral frontoparietal interactions underlie information maintenance and the striatum enacts the gate. Here, we reveal neocortical gating mechanisms in intracranial EEG patients by identifying rapid, within-trial changes in regional and inter-regional activities that predict subsequent behavioral outputs. Results first demon…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant F32NS053337

  NIH · $102k · 2008

• Role of Experience in Development of Cognitive Control and Frontal Cortex

  NIH · $2.0M · 2012–2017

• NIH Grant R01NS065046

  NIH · $1.7M · 2016

Frequent coauthors

• Apoorva Bhandari

  54 shared

• Michael J. Frank

  35 shared

• Avinash R. Vaidya

  34 shared

• Theresa M. Desrochers

  Allen Institute for Brain Science

  30 shared

• Atsushi Kikumoto

  Brown University

  28 shared

• Christopher H. Chatham

  27 shared

• Steven A. Rasmussen

  Brown University

  18 shared

• Haley Keglovits

  Brown University

  17 shared

Labs

• The Badre LabPI

Awards & honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Neuroscience
• James S. McDonnell Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cogn…
• Cognitive Neuroscience Society Young Investigator Award

Similar researchers at Brown University

• Thomas Serreh-145
• Bertram F. Malleh-65