Our research

How is it that a depressed individual may value nothing at all, whereas an addict might value drug consumption at the expense of all else?

To address this and related questions, the lab examines the neurobiology of human reward-processing and social decision-making. Our work focuses on how such processes may be perturbed and rehabilitated in psychiatric populations.

Ongoing projects use multiple converging methods (e.g., behavior, self-report, clinical interviews, computational models, EEG, fMRI) to: 1) identify neural circuitry engaged in normative reward-guided decision-making; 2) specify how these pathways go awry in clinical populations marked by deficits in valuation and volition (e.g., major depression, schizophrenia, addiction, autism); and 3) develop biologically-informed interventions by which these functional deficits may be remediated.