Reward, Decision Making and Psychopathology Group
The group studies reward and human decision making, including its relationship to psychopathology, using a range of methodologies. The research programme of the group is guided by longstanding ideas that behavioural control is an attribute of model-free (habitual) and model-based (goal directed) processing. The group avail of a range of data derived from behavioural analysis, computational modelling, psychopharmacological manipulations as well as brain imaging, primarily involving fMRI and MEG. The group harness insights from these methodologies to address critical determinants of human decision making under uncertainty across a range of contexts, including in those with anxiety and depression. A recent focus addresses how we build cognitive maps of the environment and how such a map supports model based decision making. Here the lab has developed sophisticated decoding tools, in collaboration with the lab of Timothy Behrens, that enable indexing of fast replay of neural representations during learning, episodic memory and decision making. The group are extending these methodologies to study neural replay in the context of reward and punishment, as well as in the study of psychopathology.