Our Research
The Computational Cognitive and Neural Sciences Lab at the University of California, Riverside uses a multimodal approach to investigate the mechanisms that enable people to make adaptive decisions and pursue their goals. You can read below about some of our projects.
Mechanisms of goal selection
Humans are constantly faced with decisions between different goals. For example, should you work late tonight to meet a deadline, or should you go to the store to cook yourself a healthy meal? Our research investigates how rewards influence these decisions: you may be more likely to choose to cook a healthy meal if a month of this behavior has led to rewarding improvements in health. The influence of reward on goal selection can be adaptive when it reinforces beneficial behaviors (as in the case of healthy eating) or maladaptive when it impairs the flexibility to adopt better goals (as in substance use disorder). We use a multimodal approach to study the neural mechanisms linking rewards to goal selection.
Neural circuits for behavioral flexibility
How do we adapt our behavior when it is no longer effective for achieving our goals? We are investigating how subcortical brain nuclei (including the striatum, depicted in red) and the dopamine system respond to reward feedback by engaging cognitive flexibility. A key idea from this line of work is that negative feedback is a vital signal for behavioral change and new learning. Our research suggests that psychological interventions emphasizing the informativeness of errors and losses for goal-pursuit could help improve cognitive flexibility.
​
The figure on the left depicts a biological theory underlying a new approach developed in the lab for detecting correlates of dopamine function using fMRI.
Mechanisms of social media habits
Often when pursuing goals, our habits interfere. How do habits disrupt our ongoing goal-directed behavior. We are pursuing this question by studying real-world social media habits in a novel naturalistic decision-making fMRI study. We aim to uncover the neural processes at play when we decide to use social media, and how those processes influence our memory and social emotional well-being.