Author: Derrick Dwamena

Members of the lab were able to present their posters at the just-ended Society for NeuroEconomics Conference held in Arlington, VA. We had great feedback from attendees and enjoyed the various sessions included in the conference. Shoutout to Nitisha and Deborah for posing next to their posters.

Nitisha is a current Post-doc in the Huettel lab. She obtained her Ph.D. from Ohio State University and did her undergraduate studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Nitisha uses computational modeling and process-tracing techniques, such as eye-tracking and mouse-tracking, to understand how we make social decisions. She is an excellent researcher and we are glad to have her join the team!

The Huettel lab would like to appreciate Dr. Nikki Sullivan and Dr. Rosa Li for the acceptance of their paper to Nature Scientific Reports. The paper, Peer presence increases the prosocial behavior of adolescents by speeding the evaluation of outcomes for others, comes after years of collaborative work and we are excited about it!!

The Huettel lab is excited to announce that first-year Ph.D. student, Paul McKee, has won an NSF GRFP grant. The award will support his work investigating the neural mechanisms underlying and behavioral consequences of implicit moral bias with his mentors Drs. Scott Huettel & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. We are very proud and look forward to more great work from him. 

We are excited to officially congratulate Matthew on the successful defense of his dissertation on the Dynamic Interplay between Attention and Reward. He has done amazing work over the years and we are so proud of him! We wish you the very best as you take up your new role, Dr. Matthew Bachman!

Deborah is a recent graduate from Columbia University, where she majored in Neuroscience & Behavior. There, she conducted her honors thesis in the Higgins Lab exploring the motivational determinants of moral judgment. She is interested in understanding the neural mechanisms of moral judgments and decisions, as well as the development of moral standards.

The Huettel lab at Duke University seeks a talented postdoctoral associate to conduct human research on the neural mechanisms of decision making. The position is supported by an NIH-funded grant that seeks to understand the dynamic social decision-making and how such decisions are influenced by social status. The postdoctoral associate will be part of a vibrant community of scholars in Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and will work with research-dedicated 3T MRI scanners at Duke’s Brain Imaging and Analysis Center.

The position is initially for a one-year term with renewal anticipated upon satisfactory performance. Programming skills, expertise in fMRI, and a Ph.D. in Psychology, Neuroscience, or a related field are prerequisites; experience with decision modeling and computational methods are desirable.

Interested applicants should submit their CV, a statement of research interest, and contact information for 2 references to academic jobs online and scott.huettel@duke.edu

Apply here

We are proud to announce that Matthew Bachman’s paper, “Disruptions of Sustained Spatial Attention Can Be Resistant to the Distractor’s Prior Reward Associations”, has been accepted by Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. The findings of this paper suggest that sustained spatial attention can be resistant to a distractor’s reward associations in some circumstances, indicating an important boundary condition to reward-related distraction.

Congratulations, Matthew!

We are proud to announce the acceptance of Vicki’s paper into the Journal of Economic Psychology!! The paper highlights that individuating information about people’s personal preferences, such as their favorite animal or a preferred food, can have differential effects for ingroup and outgroup members–it increases prosocial behavior toward outgroup members but leads to a decrease in prosocial behavior toward ingroup members. These results suggest that individuating information can help reduce group biases, but it does so at a cost to ingroup members.

Congratulations once more! You rock!