Subjective Value Representations in the Human Brain

Current projects

Cognitive Maps of Value Representations

How does the brain represent the value of things we encounter, and how do those representations change as stimuli become deeply familiar? This project uses functional MRI to track value-based decision making across three weeks of intensive training. Participants learned the values of novel stimuli that varied along multiple perceptual dimensions, allowing us to ask how value signals in regions like ventromedial and lateral orbitofrontal cortex emerge, sharpen, and reorganize with experience. Drawing on both the neuroeconomics tradition and recent work on cognitive maps and grid-like codes, the project bridges questions about how the brain assigns value with questions about how it structures knowledge. The work speaks to a longstanding puzzle: whether the neural code for value is fixed or whether it is continually reshaped by learning.