The lab focuses on behavior in the face of uncertainty. We employ behavioral, neuroscientific (fMRI, and EEG), and computational methods to better understand the cognitive and neural bases of decision making. Below are brief summaries of work currently underway in the lab. For more detailed information, please see our list of publications.
Reward-based Decision Making
We are interested in how people make decisions about things of value. We are particularly interested in choices that involve trade-offs between value and time. For example, lottery winners can either have their winnings paid out slowly, over time or receive a somewhat smaller amount paid immediately, in one lump sum. Which would you choose and why?- How and why does delay change the value of rewards?
- What is the relationship between the influence of delay and the influence of risk?
- Why are some individuals better able to wait for rewards than others?
- Do social situations change how people make decisions?
- What role does emotion play in these sorts of situations?
Learning
One of the factors that allows people to deal with uncertainty is the ability to learn from past experience. People are highly adept at extracting regularities from past experience and using this experience to adapt to changing environments. When studying the neural mechanisms that underlie learning, much of our research focuses on a process referred to as prediction error.- What is the neural basis of prediction error?
- What is the relationship between prediction error and working memory?
- Do implicit and explicit learning differ in their underlying mechanisms?
- How does neural data inform computational theories of learning?
- How and when do learners most easily adapt to the learning environment?