Perspectives: Joshua Gold, PhD

Joshua Gold, PhD, is a Professor of Neuroscience and co-director of the Computational Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania

Dr. Gold's laboratory studies the neural basis of decision-making; that is, how the brain can take uncertain information from a variety of sources and form categorical judgments that guide behavior. Of particular interest is the role of experience in this process, including how we learn to optimize our decisions to achieve particular goals. Approaches used include quantitative measures of behavior (“psychophysics”) combined with non-invasive measures of physiological variables, psychophysics and electrophysiology in non-human primates, and computational modeling.