Urgent Choice Lab

We carry out research in neuroscience with the goal of understanding how neural circuits generate behavior. Our work at the Department of Translational Neuroscience of Wake Forest University School of Medicine focuses on the activity of oculomotor areas of the brain, which control eye movements and determine when and where to look next. We use urgent decision-making tasks, in which a very limited amount of time is available to identify a visual target, to investigate how single neurons contribute to an individual's performance in search tasks and related behaviors. The basis of our approach is a comparison between the time point at which a participant “knows” where the target is and the time point at which individual neurons start reflecting such knowledge. Our work has implications for understanding fundamental cognitive phenomena such as attention, impulsivity, and working memory.