the SNaG Lab
We all have friends that bring out the best in us. Most of us also have a friend who influences our decisions in the worst ways, but very few operate free of the influence of others. Nearly every aspect of our behavior from eating to working to reproduction, depends on being able to fluidly communicate with others and predict their behavior (for examples of how a social context can change decision making, see https://plus.google.com/u/0/explore/socialdecisions ). We are working to understand the neural mechanisms by which social contexts change our decision making by having people play games with one and other.
In technical terms, work in our lab focuses on basic and translational research of social influences in decision making. We use a combination of behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments to tease apart the contributions that different brain regions make to decisions that involve someone else. We ask people to play games to test cognitive models of healthy and disordered social function. Our work often requires the development or adaptation of computational tools for work on neuroimaging datasets.
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