O'Doherty Lab

The ability to make decisions requires neural machinery that has been honed through evolution to enable animals to learn about the structure of their environment and uncover causal links between their own behavior and the probability of obtaining rewards.

A deeper understanding of how the brain does this will not only inspire new theories of decision making, it will also contribute to the development of genuine "artificial intelligence", and it will enable us to understand why some humans are better than others at making decisions, why humans with certain psychiatric disorders or brain lesions are less capable of doing so, and why under some circumstances humans systematically fail to make "rational" decisions.

The goal of our research is to unravel the neural computations underlying this process in the human brain.