Achievement

Trainee Katherine Luking identified the neural basis of physiologically relevant reward. Most imaging studies manipulate reward by promising monetary payment after the study. Ms. Luking manipulated the experiment by offering young adults (22-26 year olds) candy in exchange for performance on a card guessing task. By manipulating the size of reward per trial and correlating wins and losses with neural activity, Ms. Luking found brain areas underlying this reward processing that largely overlapped areas identified through monetary reward. This result suggests a central mechanism for reward processing underlying behavior. This work was published in 2013 in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience.