Expertise
Our environment is full of incentives that serve as important motivators of our behavior. Incentives are often associated with varying degrees of value (e.g., positive, negative), which can guide our choices to either pursue or avoid them––do I choose to eat a salad or a burger? do I choose to invest in a safe or risky stock? Importantly, as our decisions often occur within social environments, many such incentives are social in nature (e.g., approval from others). My research seeks to understand how the social contexts of our daily environment shape our decisions and subjective experiences of incentives. For example, how do we learn about others from social incentives (e.g., reciprocation of trust), and use this information to differentially value social stimuli (e.g., close friends versus acquaintances, a trustworthy versus an untrustworthy partner)? How do prior expectations about a person shape our impressions and decisions to interact with them? What are the neural structures and mechanisms supporting incentive-based behaviors and how to they develop? I employ behavioral, physiological and multimodal neuroimaging methods in conjunction with approaches and theory from social, cognitive and affective neuroscience, neuroeconomics and developmental affective neuroscience to address specifically: 1) the influence of social factors on incentive value; 2) the development of neural systems supporting incentive valuation; 3) behavioral and neural mechanisms sustaining social interactions.
Specialization/Interests: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Neuroscience, Decision-Making, Research Methods/Statistics
Research in the lab broadly focuses on understanding the way in which the social environment influences neural mechanisms that underlie our choices and ability to learn about others. We employ behavioral, computational (reinforcement learning), psychophysiological (skin conductance) and functional neuroimaging (fMRI) techniques to address these issues. Current and future work in the lab is centered around a few related areas of interest.
Research:
- Social Relationships
- Decisions in Social Contexts
- Atypical Experiences
Our lab investigates how social factors such as who we know and what we know about them change the way in which we learn, place value on others and social experiences and make decisions.