Tyler Cash-Padgett
Ph.D. Thesis:
Behavioral and Neural Population Dynamics Of Foraging Decisions
Undergraduate Institution and Major:
John Hopkins University, B.A. in Neuroscience, Philosophy, 2012
Graduate Advisor:
Ben Hayden, Ph.D., Department of Neuroscience
Graduate Research:
I am studying the neural population dynamics of decision making in the prefrontal cortex.
Graduate Publications:
- J Neurosci. 2023 May 17:JN-RM-1954-1922. Abstract value encoding in neural populations but not single neurons.
- Nat Commun. 2021 Aug 10;12(1):4830. Choice-relevant information transformation along a ventrodorsal axis in the medial prefrontal cortex.
- Cash-Padgett T, Hayden B. Behavioural variability contributes to over-staying in patchy foraging. Biol Lett. 2020;16(3):20190915.
- Cash-Padgett T, Azab H, Yoo SBM, Hayden BY. Opposing pupil responses to offered and anticipated reward values. Anim Cogn. 2018;21(5):671-684.
Graduate Abstracts:
- Cash-Padgett T, Hayden BY. Economic decision-making in freely moving monkeys performing a delay-based foraging task. Society for Neuroscience, 2018.
- Cash-Padgett T, Azab H, Yoo S, Hayden BY. Pupil size supports a reference-to-choice comparison mechanism in a sequential gambling task. Society for Neuroscience, 2017.
Graduate Awards/Honors:
- T32 Computational neuroscience training grant
Undergraduate or Post-bac Research:
I worked with Akira Sawa at Johns Hopkins University studying the neurobiology of schizophrenia and mood disorders. We utilized genetic models and pharmacological agents to assess behavioral endophenotypes associated with those diseases.
What Got You Interested in Research?
I was originally interested in figuring out why people do what we do and why our conscious experience is the way it is. While studying psychology in high school, I realized that neuroscience has the potential to provide truly mechanistic, reductive explanations for cognitive phenomena. I was hooked after that.