The Developmental Social Neuroscience lab investigates physiological, behavioral, and neural mechanisms underlying social decisions and learning in childhood and adolescence. Our particular focus is on neurodevelopmental disorders, so we compare social learning in typically developing (TD) kids and kids with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). To unravel the neurobiological mechanisms underlying learning and decision making, our research projects combine behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging.
Our work is supported by the Simons Foundation for Autism Research (SFARI) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).
Learning About Others Across Development
We are researching how people learn about others (social learning) and whether this learning differs from learning non-social information, such as learning about object features.
An example of social learning involves thinking about other people’s preferences.
For example: what information would we use to predict whether someone you don’t know likes ice skating? Are we relying on our own preferences or on aggregated knowledge about similar others? Once we find out how much a person likes ice skating, how do we update our impression about them and generalize to other other similar information?
We can generalize this framework to investigate non-social learning. Instead of preferences, participants learn about item-features through similar trial-by-trial updating. We are investigating how existing knowledge representations (like categorizing objects, for instance) are shifted by learning about specific item-features (e.g., how colorful objects are).
At the DSN Lab, we use behavioral experiments and a computational modeling approach to describe learning and test whether these models differentiate between children with and without autism. In addition, we investigate how different learning models are encoded in brain signals with neuroimaging techniques like EEG and fMRI.
Predicting Cooperation, Psychopathology, and Treatment Response
Can social learning predict people’s social functioning in real life as well as help us develop treatment outcomes for people with social deficits?
We are investigating whether comprehensive neurocognitive models of learning can successfully predict social interaction: for instance, people’s cooperation strategies when they work with a new person. We are also investigating whether these models predict learning in real life, such as in treatment settings.
The long-term goal of this research is to use this neurocognitive approach to inform, refine, and individualize the diagnosis, education, and treatment of youth with neurodevelopmental disorders.
Information Sampling for Decisions About Trust
Trust and cooperation are important parts of building a community! Humans develop behaviors that are important for cooperation as infants, and throughout childhood and adolescence their decisions to trust and cooperate become more sophisticated. We focus on pre-adolescence, a phase in which children begin to pay more attention to their peers in social groups, as we investigate whether cooperation strategies differentiate typically developing children from children with an Autism diagnosis.
Our goal with these studies is to understand how brain development affects the mechanisms underlying reciprocity and cooperation for typical and atypical developmental trajectories. We study how children decide to cooperate and sustain cooperation with economic exchange tasks.
Developmental Social Neuroscience Lab 