Callum Young

[w/ Paul Dodson (PPN)]
Policy Intern (Centre for Mental Health)

I completed my undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at the University of Bristol, and am currently a student on the BBSRC SWBio doctoral training programme. I am interested in how the brain’s heterogeneity may confer an advantage to reinforcement learning. To do this, I am recording dopamine neurons in behaving animals, and fitting these recordings to distributional reinforcement learning models. The goal is to explore how distributional representation of reward, in the dopaminergic system, may support an array of reward-related behaviours. Of particular interest is how parallel dopamine pathways may control the balance between goal-directed and habit behaviour. I am now a policy intern at the Centre for Mental Health.