We are starting a new study in our lab where participants play games and answer questions while in an MRI scanner. If you’re interested in participating and/or would like to know what a typical fMRI study in our lab looks like, check out this page.

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!

Just a few months after successfully defending his dissertation, Alex has accepted a full-time offer from Spotify as a Behavioral  Scientist! The Huettel Lab is very proud of Dr. Breslav for this outstanding achievement and we continue to wish him even more success in his future works. Congratulations once more!!

 

We are very proud to announce that Alex’s paper, ‘Shuffle the Decks: Children are Sensitive to Incidental Non-Random Structure in a Sequential Choice Task’, has been accepted to the top empirical journal – Psychological Science. The take-home message was that kids might look like they are making maladaptive decisions, but they instead may be sophisticated decision-makers trying to learn their world’s structure. 

Congratulations, Dr. Breslav! We look forward to more amazing projects from you!

We are excited to announce that Nikki’s paper, ‘Healthful choices depend on the latency and rate of the information accumulation’ at Nature Human Behaviour. You can access the paper here – Nature and also a blog post by Nikki can be found here – nature portfolio

 

Congratulations to Scott Huettel (@scott_huettel), recipient of the 2021 Education in Neuroimaging Award from The Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM). Dr. Huettel is recognized for his efforts to support neuroimaging through textbook publications, mentoring/training students, & outreach to other fields.

In our first meeting since the pandemic, the lab met at the R. L. Rigsbee Shelter in Duke Forest for a  potluck-style get-together.  All attendants were fully vaccinated. It also served as the going-away celebration for Alex, Andrea, and Kelsey, all of whom had successfully defended their dissertations! We wish them all the best in the next stage of their careers!!