F. Gregory Ashby

F. Gregory Ashby, Ph.D. is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of six books and almost 200 journal articles and book chapters. In 2017, he was awarded the Howard Crosby Warren Medal for outstanding achievement in Experimental Psychology in the United States and Canada. His research, which combines cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and computational modeling, has made a number of seminal contributions. First, he is known for his proposal that environmental events that elicit positive mood (e.g., happiness) cause cortical dopamine levels to rise for 20 – 30 minutes, and that these elevated dopamine levels improve executive function, creative problem solving, and working memory. Second, he was among the first to propose that humans have multiple learning systems, which for the most part, are functionally and anatomically distinct, evolved at different times for different purposes, learn different types of information, and thrive under qualitatively different types of conditions. Third, he was and remains a leader in developing the multidimensional generalization of signal detection theory called general recognition theory.