KABLE LAB

Research in the Kable Lab seeks to understand how people make decisions, and to trace out the underlying psychological and neural mechanisms of choice.  We employ an interdisciplinary approach to tackle these questions, drawing on methods and ideas from social and cognitive neuroscience, experimental economics, and personality psychology.

One of our goals is to build models of decision-making that can explain people’s choices and the neural mechanisms of choice at an algorithmic level. Recently, we have used fMRI to show that the subjective value people place on different rewards is represented in a common neural currency.  The discovery of this “utility-like” neural signal has led to our current research pursuit: the examination of situations where people’s choices may deviate from rational choice theory, and what the neural value signals in such cases help explain about these deviations.

Another goal is to understand the different sources of individual differences in decision making.  Recently, we have shown that there are dramatic differences across individuals in their degree of impulsivity.  We aim to explore the extent to which these differences are stable and trait-like as well as analyze the psychological, genetic, and neural sources of these differences.

Photo courtesy of Prin Amorapanth