This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and supported by SBE's Cognitive Neuroscience program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Joseph T. McGuire at Boston University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating the neural mechanisms of human decision-making. To make advantageous decisions in a changing world, we must learn from new observations. How quickly we learn should depend on the context: in stable but noisy environments, new observations should be given limited weight, whereas volatile environments require faster updating. The proposed work uses eye tracking and brain imaging to investigate how decision-makers incorporate new information into their existing knowledge. These methods allow us to capture the richness of an individual's subjective predictions, and investigate the effects of uncertainty and reward on sensory and cognitive representations. This work to understand human decision-making is critical to a healthy and equitable society, and is especially important when it comes to behavior that deviates from expectations. When thinking about the domains of economics and health, for instance, there are myriad examples of decisions that seem irrational. These decisions defy our sense of logic, but they are incredibly common. The proposed work seeks to further our understanding of how people take in new information and integrate it with existing knowledge to make decisions in a dynamic world. A full description of how people do this will allow us to craft better policy, promote health and prosperity, and support our national defense, taking into account the realities of human irrationality.
The first aim of the project is to explore the temporal dimension of belief updating and the influence of reward in a free-viewing implicit spatial prediction task. Eye tracking will allow us to monitor the trial-by-trial evolution of individuals' predictive distributions, and investigate the effects of reward and punishment on learning rate and saccade dynamics. In contrast to prior work, we now have access to information about the construction and updating of underlying predictive distributions, instead of single point estimates from the distribution on each trial. The second aim of the project is to use pupillometry and neuroimaging to probe the mechanisms of belief updating in a fixational spatial prediction task. Pupillometry will allow us to assess whether reward and punishment enhance learning rate through common arousal/incentive mechanisms, as this is an unresolved question in the field. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) will allow us to probe changes in sensory representations in response to different types of uncertainty (environmental noise and volatility) separately, as well as how these factors change the functional connectivity between frontal brain regions and visual cortices. This work will serve to unite research on the impact of uncertainty on sensory and cognitive processing. Ultimately, this project will help us understand how subjective belief distributions are created and updated, and how the brain dynamically adapts this process in a changing environment.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
