Achievement

IGERT trainee Alice Lin published an important component of her dissertation research in the article "Social and monetary reward learning engage overlapping neural substrates" (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience). Alice's study addresses a central issue in human decision-making: whether decision-making involving social vs. monetary rewards involve overlapping neural circuits. Alice found that three critical components of decision-making - stimulus value, experienced utility, and prediction errors - shared common circuits for social and monetary rewards. This provides important evidence for the possibility that the brain uses a common valuation system for diverse forms of rewards.