Rewards, Emotions and Decisions
Rewards motivate action, reinforce behavior, and form the basis for many social interactions. I am interested in how the brain processes rewards, and how reward processing deficits contribute to psychiatric, neurological, and neurodegenerative disorders.
With these goals in mind, my lab:
- records and analyzes brain signals during reward-guided deliberation and decision making.
- develops new experimental tools to identify, investigate and manipulate the different neuron types that constitute the brain’s reward system.
Together, these lines of research will shed new light on how neural reward systems facilitate behavior, and how reward systems dysfunction during neurological and neurodegenerative disorders.
I am actively seeking motivated postdoctoral research associates for an NIH funded project on value-based deliberation. I strongly encourage interested candidates to contact me. Experience working with monkeys and programming in Matlab are highly valued, but not absolutely necessary.
The biological and behavioral computations that influence dopamine responses.
Stauffer, WR
Dopamine prediction error responses update demand.
Rothenhoefer KM, Stauffer WR
Nonhuman Primate Optogenetics: Recent Advances and Future Directions.
Galvan A, Stauffer WR, Acker L, El-Shamayleh Y, Inoue KI, Ohayon S, Schmid MC
Reward and value coding by dopamine neurons in non-human primates.
Alikaya, A, Rack-Wildner, M, Stauffer, WR
The phasic dopamine signal maturing: from reward via behavioural activation to formal economic utility.
Schultz, W, Stauffer, WR, Lak, A
Dopamine neurons learn relative chosen value from probabilistic rewards.
Lak, A, Stauffer, WR, Schultz, W
Dopamine Neuron-Specific Optogenetic Stimulation in Rhesus Macaques.
Stauffer, WR, Lak, A, Yang, A, Borel, M, Paulsen, O, Boyden, ES, Schultz, W
Utility functions predict variance and skewness risk preferences in monkeys.
Genest, W, Stauffer, WR, Schultz, W
Components and characteristics of the dopamine reward utility signal.
Stauffer, WR, Lak, A, Kobayashi, S, Schultz, W
Systems Neuroscience: Shaping the Reward Prediction Error Signal.
Stauffer, WR
Economic Choices Reveal Probability Distortion in Macaque Monkeys.
Stauffer, WR, Lak, A, Bossaerts, P, Schultz, W
A Role For Orbitofrontal Neurons in Risky Decisions.
Lak, A, Stauffer, WR
Dopamine Reward Prediction Error Responses Reflect Marginal Utility.
Stauffer, WR, Lak, A, Schultz, W
Dopamine prediction error responses integrate subjective value from different reward dimensions.
Lak, A, Stauffer, WR, Schultz, W
