Decision Making and Reward

Our daily lives are shaped by the decisions we make and how we selectively attend to information from our environment to shape those decisions. Recent progress in the field of neuroscience has begun to shed light on how the brain underlies these critical aspects of cognition. Research among our faculty on these topics spans model systems from rodents to humans and ranges from questions about cellular mechanisms to cognitive control. Major areas of focus include:

Neural mechanisms of perceptual decisions
The cellular and circuit mechanisms that mediate the effects of spatial attention
Psychological modeling of decision processes
The role of attention in decision making
Combination of multiple sources of information for decision making
Altered decision making that accompanies drug use/abuse
How natural aging affects attentional selection and decision making
Neural mechanisms underlying suppression of distracting inputs
Coordinated processing across large-scale neural networks for attention and decision making
Computational modeling to bridge the gap between single-neuron measurements and neural network function
Executive control in attention and decision making
Links between attention, emotion, and anxiety
How attention and decision-related signals alter neural representations of sensory stimuli
The relationship between neural activity and reward-based behavior
How the brain forms predictive models of the environment

Decision Making and Reward

Faculty study attention and decision making

In-House

Affiliated