CONTROL PROCESSES 2026


June 10-12th, 2026, Ghent, Belgium

Program

Control Processes 2026 will be held at the historic Sint-Baafshuis, Room 1.05, Biezekapelstraat 2, located in the heart of Ghent, Belgium, on June 10-12th, 2026. Similar to the format of previous meetings, Control Processes will be a small, single-track meeting that will bring together scientists addressing cognitive control function from a range of approaches and levels of analysis with lots of opportunity for discussion and debate. Participants at past meetings have included scientists approaching cognitive control from human cognitive psychology, computational modeling, neuroscience, anatomy, disease and disorder, developmental, language, and animal models. Similar to previous editions, Control Processes 2026 will be PI-only, to ensure the meeting remains small. This way, most attendees can also be given the opportunity to present, through a curated set of symposia, lectures, and a keynote, as well as blitz talks selected from abstracts submitted by registered attendees. Mark your calendar, and we look forward to meeting all of you!

- Lara Bardi, Nico Boehler, Senne Braem, Clay Holroyd, Ruth Krebs, and Tom Verguts

Tentative Schedule

June 10th

12:30 pm: Welcome and registration

1:00 pm: Introduction to the conference by Senne Braem
1:15 pm: Symposium 1: How task and control representations drive behavior – chaired by Senne Braem
• Sebastian Musslick (Osnabrück University, Germany): TBA
• Marcello Mattar (New York University, US): Learning to think in recurrent neural circuits
• Maria Eckstein (Google Deepmind, UK): Understanding Human Reward Learning Using Data-Driven Models and Procedurally-Generated Task Spaces
• Timothy T. Rogers (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US): Integrating control and representation in semantic cognition

3:00 pm: Coffee break

3:30 pm: Blitz 1
4:30 pm: Keynote 1: Peter Dayan (Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Germany): Three Facets of Control

5:30 pm: Drinks reception


June 11th

9:15 am: Symposium 2: On the domain-generality and transfer of cognitive control – chaired by Nico Boehler
• Michael W. Cole (Rutgers University, US): Cross-task generalization of representations by brain network flows
• Kelly Grace Garner (University of New South Wales, Australia): Towards the definition and measurement of routines and their impact on cognitive control
• Torkel Klingberg (Karolinska Institutet, Sweden): Brain States Controlling Flexibility and Stability in Cognition
• N. Bonnie Nozari (Indiana University, US): Neural domain-generality of control does not imply transfer of control between tasks

11:00 am: Coffee break

11:30 am: Blitz 2

12:30 pm: Lunch break

1:30 pm: Symposium 3: Control processes in everyday life – Chaired by Ruth Krebs
• Sanne de Wit (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands): Capturing Habitual and Goal-Directed Control in Everyday Life
• Claire Gillan (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland): Hidden habits, adaptation, and compulsivity
• Laurence Hunt (University of Oxford, UK): Decision Neuroscience in Dynamic Worlds
• Anna-Lena Schubert (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany): Decomposing attentional control: Computational modeling of conflict tasks via amortized Bayesian inference

3:15 pm: Coffee break

3:45 pm: Blitz 3

6:30 pm: Conference Dinner

you got me!

June 12th

9:15 am: Keynote 2: Dani S. Bassett (University of Pennsylvania & Santa Fe Institute, US): A network perspective on control processes in neural systems

10:15 am: Coffee break

10:45 am: Symposium 4: The nature of cognitive effort – chaired by Clay Holroyd
• Eliana Vassena (Radboud University & Donders Institute, Netherlands): The neurochemical mechanisms of effort allocation and persistence
• Thomas Goschke (Dresden University of Technology, Germany): TBA
• Mathias Pessiglione (Paris Brain Institute, France): Origins and consequences of cognitive fatigue
• Andrew Westbrook (Rutgers University, US): Scale-invariant EEG dynamics supporting cognitive flexibility are suppressed by effort

12:30 pm: Lunch break

1:30 pm: Blitz 4

2:30 pm: Coffee break

3:00 pm: Symposium 5: The role of oscillations in cognitive control – Chaired by Tom Verguts
• Pascal Fries (Max Planck Institute, Germany): Learning of stimulus probability and reward value in early visual cortex
• Satu Palva (University of Helsinki, Finland): Critical synchronization dynamics and controllability
• Thilo Womelsdorf (Vanderbilt University, US): Oscillatory coordination during the updating of goal representations: Gate, switch and amplify fronto-striatal routing states
• Olav E Krigolson (University of Victoria, Canada): Revisiting Frontal Theta EEG Power as an Index of Cognitive Control
4:45 pm: Closing remarks by Tom Verguts

Keynote Speakers

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Dani S. Bassett
University of Pennsylvania & Santa Fe Institute, US
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Peter Dayan
Max Planck Institute, Tübingen, Germany

Confirmed Speakers

Michael W. Cole (Rutgers University, US)
Sanne de Wit (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)
Maria Eckstein (Google Deepmind, UK)
Pascal Fries (Max Planck Institute, Germany)
Kelly Grace Garner (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Claire Gillan (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)
Thomas Goschke (Dresden University of Technology, Germany)
Laurence Hunt (University of Oxford, UK)
Torkel Klingberg (Karolinska Institutet, Sweden)
Olav E Krigolson (University of Victoria, Canada)
Marcello Mattar (New York University, US)
Sebastian Musslick (Osnabrück University, Germany)
N. Bonnie Nozari (Indiana University, US)
Satu Palva (University of Helsinki, Finland)
Mathias Pessiglione (Paris Brain Institute, France)
Timothy T. Rogers (University of Wisconsin-Madison, US)
Anna-Lena Schubert (University of Mainz, Germany)
Eliana Vassena (Radboud University & Donders Institute, Netherlands)
Andrew Westbrook (Rutgers University, US)
Thilo Womelsdorf (Vanderbilt University, US)

Organising Committees

Local Organising Committee
Lara Bardi (Ghent University)
Nico Boehler (Ghent University)
Senne Braem (Ghent University)
Clay Holroyd (Ghent University)
Ruth Krebs (Ghent University)
Tom Verguts (Ghent University)

Main Organising Committee
Roshan Cools (Radboud University)
David Badre (Brown University)
Tobias Egner (Duke University)