How does the brain compute strategic prosocial decisions?

A foundational question in decision neuroscience is whether neural activity in a region merely correlates with behavior, or actually drives it. Working with Dr. Camillo Padoa-Schioppa, we used microstimulation at varying current levels to show that OFC activity causally shapes economic choices: low currents facilitated value encoding and biased choices, while high currents disrupted value representations. Strikingly, even very low currents altered choices specifically at the value comparison stage rather than the valuation stage, revealing dissociable computational processes within OFC.

As a Wu Tsai Postdoctoral Fellow and NIMH T32 fellow with Drs. Steve Chang, Anirvan Nandy, and Monika Jadi, I extended my decision neuroscience framework to cooperative social behavior. Most social neuroscience paradigms are artificial and constrained. To address this, I co-developed an integrated platform combining a naturalistic cooperative task, markerless behavioral tracking, and custom wireless high-density neural recordings, enabling simultaneous measurement of behavior and neural activity in freely interacting dyads.

Using this platform, we found that dyads develop diverse and flexible behavioral repertoires rather than converging on a fixed strategy, and that this flexibility predicts cooperative success. Dynamic Bayesian Network analysis revealed two distinct classes of cooperative strategy: gaze-dependent coordination, where animals actively monitor their partner before acting, and gaze-independent rhythm-based coordination.

My planned research program will build a mechanistic understanding of how the brain navigates strategic social interactions under conditions of inequity. The central hypothesis is that communication between the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and the dorsal striatum implements the computations that guide these choices. The near-term work will take two complementary approaches: a model-free approach using Dynamic Bayesian Networks to discover the repertoire of cooperative strategies animals develop under effort inequity and their neural correlates in dmPFC, and a model-based approach using drift-diffusion and reinforcement learning models to formalize the cognitive mechanisms underlying those strategies and link model parameters directly to neural population dynamics.