Praveen Prem

Neuroscience Master's Student

Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta

Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

pprem@ualberta.ca

Hi, I'm Praveen :)

I’m a current Neuroscience graduate student at the Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta, supervised by Dr. Jacqueline Cummine and Dr. Kyle Nash. My current 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, emotion-driven behavior, and decision-making; and 2. structural neuroimaging using 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 towards decision-making, as my deepest interest lies in cognitive biases and abstract cognition. I’m curious about the human ability to mentally represent problems that are psychologically distant in time or probability, and how (if) that shapes the boundary 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. On an impersonal and larger 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 inspiration, I aspire 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 a function of “abstractness” of a context? Or, 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.

Before I finished my undergraduate from the University of Alberta with a BSc. Spec. in Psychology, I was 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.

selected publications

Neuroscience

Neuroanatomical correlates of auditory and visual statistical learning: Cortical and subcortical volume predictors

Praveen Prem, Sukhmani Kaur Saggu, Adwoa Boadu, and 3 more authors

Neuroscience, 2025

Abs DOI

Statistical Learning (SL) is the ability to implicitly extract and learn statistical regularities from the environment. SL processes are ubiquitous across the lifespan through their proven role in language acquisition and adaptive behaviors. While recent neuroimaging research has identified networks of active brain regions during SL processes, less is known about whether structural differences in these regions may contribute to SL abilities. Here, we explore the extent to which visual SL (VSL) and auditory SL (ASL) performance are linked to cortical vs. subcortical brain volume. 61 Participants (43 Female) completed ASL and VSL tasks, each involving a familiarization and a testing phase. During familiarization, participants observed a sequence of structured triplets of unfamiliar and non-linguistic shapes (for VSL), and environmental sounds (for ASL). During testing, participants identified correct triplets/pairs on a series of alternative-forced-choice questions for both VSL and ASL. High-resolution T1-weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans were taken of all participants, from which volumes were extracted for each cortical (planum temporale, fusiform gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus) and subcortical (caudate, nucleus accumbens, putamen, globus pallidus) regions of interest. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that performance during the ASL task was significantly related to the volume of the IFG, whereas VSL performance was significantly associated with volumes of all examined subcortical ROIs (p < 0.05). These findings suggest that differences in the IFG and subcortical volumes are differentially associated with SL abilities across visual and auditory modalities, further advancing our understanding of the domain-general and domain-specific aspects of SL processes.