Department of Psychology
Psychology is the science of mind, brain, and behavior. The Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania is the oldest continuously functioning psychology department in North America and has a rich history. Consistently ranked among the top Psychology Departments in the world, its graduate program has produced a disproportionate number of today's leading psychological scientists (see list). Today, the department's faculty apply rigorous methods to answer questions in a wide range of overlapping research areas.
View open-access research from the Positive Psychology Center.
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Publication Functionally Dissociable Influences on Learning Rate in a Dynamic Environment(2014-11-19) McGuire, Joseph T; Nassar, Matthew R; Kable, Joseph W; Gold, Joshua IMaintaining accurate beliefs in a changing environment requires dynamically adapting the rate at which one learns from new experiences. Beliefs should be stable in the face of noisy data but malleable in periods of change or uncertainty. Here we used computational modeling, psychophysics, and fMRI to show that adaptive learning is not a unitary phenomenon in the brain. Rather, it can be decomposed into three computationally and neuroanatomically distinct factors that were evident in human subjects performing a spatial-prediction task: (1) surprise-driven belief updating, related to BOLD activity in visual cortex; (2) uncertainty-driven belief updating, related to anterior prefrontal and parietal activity; and (3) reward-driven belief updating, a context-inappropriate behavioral tendency related to activity in ventral striatum. These distinct factors converged in a core system governing adaptive learning. This system, which included dorsomedial frontal cortex, responded to all three factors and predicted belief updating both across trials and across individuals.Publication Divergent Relationship of Depression Severity to Social Reward Responses Among Patients With Bipolar Versus Unipolar Depression(2016-08-30) Sharma, Anup; Satterthwaite, Theodore D; Vandekar, Lillie; Katchmar, Natalie; Ruparel, Kosha; Daldal, Aylin; Elliott, Mark A; Bladassano, Claudia; Thase, Michael E; Kable, Joseph W; Gur, Raquel E; Wolf, Daniel HNeuroimaging studies of mood disorders demonstrate abnormalities in brain regions implicated in reward processing. However, there is a paucity of research investigating how social rewards affect reward circuit activity in these disorders. Here, we evaluated the relationship of both diagnostic category and dimensional depression severity to reward system function in bipolar and unipolar depression. In total, 86 adults were included, including 24 patients with bipolar depression, 24 patients with unipolar depression, and 38 healthy comparison subjects. Participants completed a social reward task during 3T BOLD fMRI. On average, diagnostic groups did not differ in activation to social reward. However, greater depression severity significantly correlated with reduced bilateral ventral striatum activation to social reward in the bipolar depressed group, but not the unipolar depressed group. In addition, decreased left orbitofrontal cortical activation correlated with more severe symptoms in bipolar depression, but not unipolar depression. These differential dimensional effects resulted in a significant voxelwise group by depression severity interaction. Taken together, these results provide initial evidence that deficits in social reward processing are differentially related to depression severity in the two disorders.Publication Decision Makers Calibrate Behavioral Persistence on the Basis of Time-Interval Experience(2012-08-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph WA central question in intertemporal decision making is why people reverse their own past choices. Someone who initially prefers a long-run outcome might fail to maintain that preference for long enough to see the outcome realized. Such behavior is usually understood as reflecting preference instability or self-control failure. However, if a decision maker is unsure exactly how long an awaited outcome will be delayed, a reversal can constitute the rational, utility-maximizing course of action. In the present behavioral experiments, we placed participants in timing environments where persistence toward delayed rewards was either productive or counterproductive. Our results show that human decision makers are responsive to statistical timing cues, modulating their level of persistence according to the distribution of delay durations they encounter. We conclude that temporal expectations act as a powerful and adaptive influence on people’s tendency to sustain patient decisions. Highlights ► Participants decided how long to wait for temporally uncertain rewards. ► The distribution of possible delays determines whether persistence is productive. ► Different conditions, matched for reward rate, required high or low persistence. ► With experience, decision makers appropriately adjusted their willingness to wait. ► Apparent failures of persistence can reflect adaptive temporal judgments.Publication The Neurobiology of Decision: Consensus and Controversy(2009-09-24) Kable, Joseph W; Glimcher, Paul WWe review and synthesize recent neurophysiological studies of decision making in humans and nonhuman primates. From these studies, the basic outline of the neurobiological mechanism for primate choice is beginning to emerge. The identified mechanism is now known to include a multicomponent valuation stage, implemented in ventromedial prefrontal cortex and associated parts of striatum, and a choice stage, implemented in lateral prefrontal and parietal areas. Neurobiological studies of decision making are beginning to enhance our understanding of economic and social behavior as well as our understanding of significant health disorders where people's behavior plays a key role.Publication Medial Prefrontal Cortical Activity Reflects Dynamic Re-Evaluation During Voluntary Persistence(2015-01-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph WDeciding how long to keep waiting for future rewards is a nontrivial problem, especially when the timing of rewards is uncertain. We carried out an experiment in which human decision makers waited for rewards in two environments in which reward-timing statistics favored either a greater or lesser degree of behavioral persistence. We found that decision makers adaptively calibrated their level of persistence for each environment. Functional neuroimaging revealed signals that evolved differently during physically identical delays in the two environments, consistent with a dynamic and context-sensitive reappraisal of subjective value. This effect was observed in a region of ventromedial prefrontal cortex that is sensitive to subjective value in other contexts, demonstrating continuity between valuation mechanisms involved in discrete choice and in temporally extended decisions analogous to foraging. Our findings support a model in which voluntary persistence emerges from dynamic cost/benefit evaluation rather than from a control process that overrides valuation mechanisms.Publication The Neural Correlated of Subjective Value During Intertemporal Choice(2007-01-01) Kable, Joseph W; Glimcher, Paul WNeuroimaging studies of decision-making have generally related neural activity to objective measures (such as reward magnitude, probability or delay), despite choice preferences being subjective. However, economic theories posit that decision-makers behave as though different options have different subjective values. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that neural activity in several brain regions—particularly the ventral striatum, medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex—tracks the revealed subjective value of delayed monetary rewards. This similarity provides unambiguous evidence that the subjective value of potential rewards is explicitly represented in the human brain.Publication Deciding to Curtail Persistence(2016-01-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph WImagine that a few seconds ago you called a restaurant to book a reservation and were placed on hold. How soon do you expect to be helped? Are you having any difficulty waiting? Now imagine 5 minutes have gone by and you are still hearing hold music. Is it getting more difficult? Have your expectations changed? How much longer will you give them? Voluntary persistence toward delayed rewards has often been framed, in the psychological literature, as a self-control problem. This view presumes that it is generally beneficial to direct one's behavior toward valuable prospects in the future, but that the fallible nature of self-control makes people sometimes succumb to immediate temptations instead. In laboratory studies, individuals who wait longer for delayed rewards have been deemed to possess greater self-control capacity. In real life, though, how long it is worth holding out for future rewards can be a more vexed question. Not all long-run rewards is complicated by the fact that future events are uncertain in both their substance and their timing. When it comes to choosing how long to wait for everything from city buses to customer service representatives, decision makers can as easily err by waiting too long--chasing sunk costs-- as by waiting too little. In this chapter we review research suggesting that the challenge of delaying gratification does not emerge merely from psychological limitations but instead reflects the genuine complexity of the environments in which real-world decisions take place.Publication Resident Decision Making: Opioids in the Outpatient Setting(2016-05-01) Kable, Joseph W; Siegler, James E; Chatterjee, AnjanPain represents the chief complaint for nearly half of all emergency department (ED) and outpatient clinic visits in the United States, and as much as it pains the first author to admit it (being a resident physician himself), residents are the frontline clinicians who encounter these patients. Despite available resources, residents often are ill-prepared to manage these patients, particularly in regard to the use of opioid analgesics. Compared to other providers, residents are more likely to overtreat abusers of opioid analgesics and refill opioid prescriptions more quickly. The reasons for this behavior deserve further scrutiny. In this Perspectives article, we ask why residents may be more likely to prescribe opioids for pain, and we provide recommendations for educational interventions to address this.Publication Cognitive Neuroscience Methods: An Introductory Overview for Social Scientists(2017-01-01) Parthasarathi, Trishala; Kable, Joseph WA challenge to doing interdisciplinary research is developing a solid understanding of the methods used by different fields. This challenge is particularly acute when the methods may be technologically complex. This chapter provides and introductory overview of the methods of cognitive neuroscience. This overview is intended for the people who are new to the field and who have very little, if any, knowledge of cognitive neuroscience techniques. Though the primary goal is to provide social scientists who are interested in bribery the necessary foundation to understand subsequent chapters that use these techniques, a broader aim is to also spark ideas about how future research could use neuroscience to better inform our understanding of bribery.Publication Neuroeconomic Studies of Impulsivity: Now or Just as Soon as Possible?(2007-05-02) Glimcher, Paul W; Kable, Joseph W; Louie, KenwayExisting behavioral studies of intertemporal choice suggest that both human and animal choosers are impulsive. One possible explanation for this is that they discount future gains in a hyperbolic or quasi-hyperbolic fashion (David I. Laibson 1997; Shane Frederick, George Loewenstein, and Ted O’Donoghue 2002). This observation stands in contrast to standard normative theory, which predicts exponential discounting for any single maximizing agent (Robert H. Strotz 1956). This disparity between empirical and normative approaches is typically explained by proposing that human choosers suffer from inner conflict, balancing an impulse for an immediate gratification against other forces calling for delayed gratification (Richard H. Thaler and H. M. Shefrin 1981; Laibson 1997; Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine 2006; Jess Benhabib and Alberto Bisin 2005; B. Douglas Bernheim and Antonio Rangel 2004; Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer 2001). We hoped to better understand both the behavioral and algorithmic roots of this phenomenon by conducting a series of behavioral and neurobiological experiments on intertemporal choice. The results of our behavioral experiments deviate significantly from the predictions of both normative and inner conflict models. The results of our neurobiological experiments provide new algorithmic insights into the mechanisms of intertemporal choice.