Social Conformity in Autism.

Humans are extremely susceptible to social influence. Here, we examine whether this susceptibility is altered in autism, a condition characterized by social difficulties. Autistic participants (N = 22) and neurotypical controls (N = 22) completed a memory test of previously seen words and were then exposed to answers supposedly given by four other individuals.

The brain adapts to dishonesty.

Dishonesty is an integral part of our social world, influencing domains ranging from finance and politics to personal relationships. Anecdotally, digressions from a moral code are often described as a series of small breaches that grow over time. Here we provide empirical evidence for a gradual escalation of self-serving dishonesty and reveal a neural mechanism supporting it.

The Impact of Menstrual Cycle Phase on Economic Choice and Rationality.

It is well known that hormones affect both brain and behavior, but less is known about the extent to which hormones affect economic decision-making. Numerous studies demonstrate gender differences in attitudes to risk and loss in financial decision-making, often finding that women are more loss and risk averse than men. It is unclear what drives these effects and whether cyclically varying hormonal differences between men and women contribute to differences in economic preferences.

An expected utility maximizer walks into a bar….

We conducted field experiments at a bar to test whether blood alcohol concentration (BAC) correlates with violations of the generalized axiom of revealed preference (GARP) and the independence axiom. We found that individuals with BACs well above the legal limit for driving adhere to GARP and independence at rates similar to those who are sober. This finding led to the fielding of a third experiment to explore how risk preferences might vary as a function of BAC.

Choice from non-choice: predicting consumer preferences from blood oxygenation level-dependent signals obtained during passive viewing.

Decision-making is often viewed as a two-stage process, where subjective values are first assigned to each option and then the option of the highest value is selected. Converging evidence suggests that these subjective values are represented in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). A separate line of evidence suggests that activation in the same areas represents the values of rewards even when choice is not required, as in classical conditioning tasks.

Antagonism of lateral amygdala alpha1-adrenergic receptors facilitates fear conditioning and long-term potentiation.

Norepinephrine receptors have been studied in emotion, memory, and attention. However, the role of alpha1-adrenergic receptors in fear conditioning, a major model of emotional learning, is poorly understood. We examined the effect of terazosin, an alpha1-adrenergic receptor antagonist, on cued fear conditioning.

Dopaminergic drugs modulate learning rates and perseveration in Parkinson's patients in a dynamic foraging task.

Making appropriate choices often requires the ability to learn the value of available options from experience. Parkinson's disease is characterized by a loss of dopamine neurons in the substantia nigra, neurons hypothesized to play a role in reinforcement learning. Although previous studies have shown that Parkinson's patients are impaired in tasks involving learning from feedback, they have not directly tested the widely held hypothesis that dopamine neuron activity specifically encodes the reward prediction error signal used in reinforcement learning models.