Praveen Prem

Hi, I'm Praveen :)

I’m a current Neuroscience graduate student at the University of Alberta, supervised by Dr. Jacqueline Cummine and Dr. Kyle Nash. My research may be grouped into two themes: 1. cognitive, affective and decision neuroscience, where I apply different approaches of functional neuroimaging methods (fMRI, fcMRI, EEG) to investigate neural correlates of cognitive processes of learning, emotionally driven behavior, social interaction, and decision-making; and 2. structural neuroimaging and morphometry that includes DTI, surface/voxel based morphometry, and developing segmentation methods for fine-scale structures such as cranial nerve nuclei in the brainstem.

For future direction, I’m steering my research toward the mechanisms of decision-making, as my deepest interest lies in cognitive biases and the limits of abstract cognition. Treating the ability to mentally represent problems that are distant in time, space, or probability, as a cognitive capacity, how well would that act as a boundary condition for rational choice. Roughly, can we understand how well (or poorly) people can conceptualize far-off consequences, and could it shed light on how that capacity shapes everyday and policy-level decisions. This has been studied quite widely in temporal discounting tasks and dietary decision-making. But on an impersonal level, this question becomes especially urgent for high-construal challenges such as climate change, overpopulation, and other long-horizon policy issues, situations where individual action often contradicts long-term collective welfare. Why do these problems feel so intangible, and why does that intangibility blunt motivated action? With that as motivation, I plan to tackle this with a neuroeconomics framework. For example, by examining neural markers of delay discounting, risk valuation, and related processes, could we trace how decision parameters shift as the “abstractness” of a context increases? Put differently, can we test whether (and how) the brain’s valuation circuitry recalibrates when the stakes are psychologically distant? This line of work could clarify both the cognitive bottlenecks and the neural substrates that make large-scale, temporally extended problems so hard to tackle.

I finished my undergraduate from the University of Alberta with a BSc (Specialization) in Psychology. I initially started my undergraduate journey in a clinical psychology program where I gained experience working with individuals with mental disorders in a psychotherapy setting. This is where I developed a strong interest in sources of irrational thinking such as cognitive distortions, logical fallacies, and biases (both in abnormal and normal populations) that eventually directed my interest towards behavioural economics and the neuroscience behind decision-making.