Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

The study of decision making offers a path to understanding higher brain function at a mechanistic level. Even simple decisions of the sort humans and animals make many times per minute can reveal the computational and neuronal primitives underlying more complex processes. These include evaluating multiple sources of evidence, predicting and planning for the near future, and reasoning about one’s own mental operations (i.e., metacognition).

 

The goal of our research is to reverse-engineer these cognitive building blocks by recording and manipulating neural population activity in nonhuman primates. Monkeys are trained to perform a variety of perceptual and mnemonic decision tasks, often accompanied by behavioral assays of decision confidence. Ongoing projects focus on multisensory (visual-vestibular) self-motion judgments using flight-simulator technology, and on sequential decisions during navigation in virtual reality. The long-term goal of this work is to identify basic mechanisms of biological (embodied) intelligence, and to pave the way toward developing or enhancing treatments for neurological and psychiatric disorders.