How good are we at making decisions? Bayesian Decision Theory (BDT) is one methodology commonly used to answer this question. BDT focuses on the types of information, and their relative uncertainties, to understand how we weigh different types of information to make a decision. And more importantly, it provides a framework to assess the extent to which this decision-making process can be considered ‘optimal’.

Current/recent projects:

• How does Borderline Personality Disorder affect decision-making behavior as viewed through the lens of Bayesian Decision Theory? One recent study from the lab hypothesized that, given certain key characteristics of those with BPD including unstable opinions of themselves and others, that the BPD patients would rely less on previous experiences when making decisions (in comparison to the control participants). But this is not quite what our results showed.
• Does stress affect Bayesian Decision-Making, namely, does it make people pay more attention to incoming sensory information?

Decision-making may rely on a common architecture across sensory modalities and task types. It is thus of interest to the field of decision science to learn more about which neural and psychological characteristics of decisions are shared across decision-making contexts. Are the algorithms for decision-selection consistent across decision contexts? How do individuals represent uncertainty across different sensory modalities and tasks? Do people make inferences about future events given past evidence using the same (Bayesian) framework across tasks? Our laboratory aims to understand these shared (and unique) features of decisions across domains.

Current/recent projects: 

• One ongoing study in our lab has found that confidence ratings are well-correlated across a variety of decision-making tasks from different domains (e.g. social, emotion recognition, visual perception) and are related to individual differences in personality and clinically relevant symptoms and traits

A decision is not made in a vacuum. People usually make decisions in a social setting. Would people trust others to potentially pursue collective larger gain in the face of social uncertainty? What kind of factors would influence peoples’ trust and risk decision-making? How would people make trust and risk related decisions under different social contexts? How would people weigh self- and other-regarding valuations? How would people learn the value of behaviors involving individual and others’ benefits? Our laboratory aims to understand the underlying components that influence people’s trust and risk-related decisions under distinct social contexts and how people learn about others' prosocial tendencies through trial and error.

How does psychopathology affect decision-making? Are there tasks people with certain diagnosis (e.g. depression; borderline personality disorder; bipolar disorder) are impaired on, and others where they perform as well or even better than people without the diagnosis? And can these give us clues on the causal root of some of the atypical behaviors seen in these individuals? Our research combines behavior and computational modeling to try to answer some of these questions

Current/recent projects: 

• What environmental factors contribute to the development of depression & depressed-like behaviors, and how does these depression affect how people make reward and non-reward (e.g. sensorimotor & perceptual) decisions? 
• A current project in the lab investigates the relationship between learned-helplessness and anhedoia (the inability to experience pleasure) that is the hallmark of depression. 
• Another study examines how depressed people perceive and ultize prior and sensory information compared to neurotypical controls, and if such behavioral strategies can be explained by Bayesian models.