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Dr. O'Reilly received his Ph.D. in 1996 from Carnegie Mellon
University. After a one-year postdoc at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty at the University
of Colorado at Boulder in the Fall of 1997. Dr. O'Reilly's
overall research goal is to understand the biological and
computational bases of human cognition. This is a particularly
challenging endeavor because of the complexity of both cognition
and neurobiology. To make progress, some simplifying assumptions
are required. Computational models, based on simplified biological
neurons, play this role in his work. These models are capable
of making links between important biological properties and
cognitive phenomena, and doing so in a way that can provide
explanations and insight that were not available in considerations
of either neurobiology or cognition separately. O'Reilly has
focused this approach on understanding the roles of the hippocampus,
posterior neocortex, and frontal neocortex in learning and
memory.
Selected Publications:
Rougier, N.P., Noelle, D., Braver, T.S., Cohen, J.D. &
O'Reilly, R.C. (2005). Prefrontal Cortex and the Flexibility
of Cognitive Control: Rules Without Symbols. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 7338-7343.
Frank, M.J., Seeberger, L.C. & O'Reilly, R.C. (2004).
By carrot or by stick: Cognitive reinforcement learning in
Parkinsonism. Science, 306, 1940-3.
Norman, K.A. & O'Reilly, R.C. (2003). Modeling Hippocampal
and Neocortical Contributions to Recognition Memory: A Complementary
Learning Systems Approach. Psychological Review, 110, 611-646.
O'Reilly, R.C. & Munakata, Y. (2000). Computational Explorations
in Cognitive Neuroscience: Understanding the Mind by Simulating
the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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