We study how neural structures implement interpersonal transactions.
Animals integrate prior and current knowledge about the state of their world in order to make decisions that improve their position. Interpersonal decisions (a.k.a. social, economic or muli-agent) are no different. Priors can include social preferences, heuristics, and stereotypes that bias actions across contexts. And the current state of the world typically includes information about the state and likely actions of other human agents.
In our work, we exploit game-theoretic experimental paradigms, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and learning theory in order to quantitatively understand social behavior and its neural substrates.