Emotions are ubiquitous in all human experiences, affecting every part of our social lives including our thoughts, perceptions, and decisions. When faced with someone asking …
The brain’s ability to attribute valence to sensory stimuli in our environment and modulate these associations to reflect its current state is essential for goal …
Visual perceptual learning is defined as visual performance improvement after visual perceptual experiences. It is controversial how changes in association with feature representation change, namely …
In the context of vast, complex, and dynamic social networks, strategic decision making relies on knowing how people are connected within their larger social communities. …
Abstract of Aging Effects on Task-Evoked Pupillary Reponses, by Mingjian He, Degree ScM., Brown University, May 2018. Previous studies have found decreased cell counts and …
Biological brains are dynamic. Recent advances in electrophysiology and neuroimaging have helped uncover various mechanisms through which brains construct and utilize rich variations in neural …
Objective: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) has become a widely adopted treatment for the advanced progression of Parkinson’s disease (PD) and is thought to modulate the …
People can flexibly adjust how they achieve their goals by configuring cognitive control, but the investment of cognitive control must be sufficiently motivated. Whereas prior …
In order to navigate a complex web of relationships, an individual must learn and represent the connections between people in a social network. However, the …
In this thesis, we explored mechanisms for how the brain transforms incoming sensory information into meaningful motor output. The motor cortex is known as the …
The basal ganglia has been implicated in motivational behavior, reinforcement learning, reward seeking, and action selection. The dual nature of these behaviors, i.e. encouragement vs. …
In the current project, I examined how efficiently people learn social norms. Specifically, I investigated the relative learning efficiency for social norms by comparing it …
Reusing knowledge allows intelligent systems to learn solutions to complex tasks more quicker by avoiding re-learning the components of the solution from scratch. Recent advances …
Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a common neurodegenerative disease characterized by distinct motor symptoms such as tremor, bradykinesia, and rigidity. These symptoms present heterogeneously across patients …
Why should an animal move? Given that actions have time, energy, and opportunity costs, all behavior should benefit an animal, maximizing its current or future …
Cognitive effort is often aversive, which is evident in people’s tendency to avoid cognitively demanding tasks. The intrinsic cost of effort has been coined as …
Declarative memory has long been known to depend on the medial temporal lobe memory system. Recently, there has been renewed focus on the relationship between …
The two main claims of my dissertation are summarized in its contradictory-sounding title: "Nothing Is Bad, and so Is Suffering." Across three interrelated papers, I …
The medial temporal lobe (MTL) plays important roles in humans and animal cognition, for example, in episodic memory and spatial navigation. In rodents, two prominent …
