F. Gregory Ashby is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
In 1980, he was awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship, which he completed in the lab of William K. Estes at Harvard University during the 1981-1982 academic year.
Professionally, he served as President of the Society for Mathematical Psychology (1995-1996), Chair of the National Institutes of Health Cognition and Perception Study Section (2005-2007), and Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition (2000-2002).
In 2017, he was awarded the Howard Crosby Warren Medal for outstanding achievement in Experimental Psychology in the United States and Canada.
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.