RESEARCH

Would you rather eat a healthy salad or a juicy burger? How hard would you be willing to work to get your favorite food? One important aspect of decision-making is valuation, how subjective value is assigned to different goods based on individual perceptions and preferences. 

Research in our lab uses event-related potentials (ERP) to map when neural value signals emerge over the time course of choice, and how these signals are affected by factors such as  self-regulation, effort cost, and social decision-making. We have identified neural correlates of subjective value from approximately 450 to 650 ms after stimulus onset at central and frontotemporal sensors, localized to regions including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) of the brain.

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From jumping jacks to jumping for joy, human body movements provide a rich source of information about people's intentions and emotions. One prominent theory suggests that, rather than relying solely on visual information to understand movements, we recruit our own motor systems, parts of the brain responsible for planning and executing actions. Consistent with action simulation theory, previous research using EEG has found decreased magnitude of neural oscillations in the mu band (8-13 Hz) both when individuals execute their own movements (action execution, or AE) and when they observe the actions of others (action observation, or AO).

However, a number of questions remain about mu suppression associated with AO. Many previous studies of this effect had methodological issues such as small sample sizes and not controlling for visual and attentional differences when participants viewed human vs. non-human movements. Research in our lab has addressed these issues while further exploring how mu suppression is affected by the emotional content and familiarity of the observed movement, as well as other sources of bias in the EEG signal.

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