Achievement

IGERT trainee Vanessa Janowski and IGERT faculty Colin Camerer and Antonio Rangel discovered that empathic decision making involves a network of brain structures involved in both individual decision-making and social cognition. Specifically, they found that when one makes decisions on behalf of others to maximize their well-being, the inferior parietal lobule (IPL) encoded a variable measuring the distance between the other's and self preferences, which provides a hint for how the mixture of self- and other-simulation might be implemented in empathic choices. This research was published in the article, “Empathic choice involves vmPFC value signals that are modulated by social processing implemented in IPL,” Social and Cognitive Affective Neuroscience, 2012.