Faculty

Joseph W Kable, Ph.D.

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Assistant Professor of Psychology
Department: Psychology
Graduate Group Affiliations

Contact information
Solomon Labs, Room C5
3720 Walnut St.
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Office: 215-746-3873
Education:
Ph.D. (Neuroscience)
University of Pennsylvania, 2004.
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Description of Research Expertise

Research Interests:

Neural mechanisms of human decision-making


Keywords:

Neuroeconomics, Decision-making, Social Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Computational Neuroscience


Research Details:

Research in my lab seeks to understand how people make decisions, and to trace out the psychological and neural mechanisms of choice. We employ an interdisciplinary approach to tackle these questions, drawing on methods and ideas from social and cognitive neuroscience, experimental economics, and personality psychology. We aim to draw links across these different levels of analysis, and to build explanations of decision-making that account for both people's choices and the neural mechanisms underlying those choices.

One of our goals is to understand the mechanisms underlying changes in people's preferences. Recently, we have used fMRI to show that the subjective value people place on different rewards is represented in a common neural currency -- a "utility"-like neural signal. We are now examining how neural value signals change when people change their decisions for different reasons (e.g., heuristics and biases, preferences evolving over time, education, or social influence).

Another goal is to understand the different sources of individual differences in decision making. Recently, we have reported dramatic differences across individuals in impulsivity, which are associated with how certain brain regions are active during decision-making. We aim to explore the extent to which differences in decision-making are stable and trait-like as opposed to context-dependent, and to analyze the psychological, genetic, and neural sources of these differences.


Lab Personnel:

Stav Atir, Research Assistant
Annika Hillebrandt, Research Assistant
Nicole Senecal, Graduate Student

Selected Publications

Kable Joseph W: Just a little (lateral prefrontal) patience. Nature neuroscience 13(5): 523-4, May 2010.

Kable Joseph W, Glimcher Paul W: An "as soon as possible" effect in human intertemporal decision making: behavioral evidence and neural mechanisms. Journal of neurophysiology 103(5): 2513-31, May 2010.

Kable Joseph W, Glimcher Paul W: The neurobiology of decision: consensus and controversy. Neuron 63(6): 733-45, Sep 2009.

Kable Joseph W, Glimcher Paul W: The neural correlates of subjective value during intertemporal choice. Nature neuroscience 10(12): 1625-33, Dec 2007.

Kable Joseph W, Chatterjee Anjan: Specificity of action representations in the lateral occipitotemporal cortex. Journal of cognitive neuroscience 18(9): 1498-517, Sep 2006.

Kan Irene P, Kable Joseph W, Van Scoyoc Amanda, Chatterjee Anjan, Thompson-Schill Sharon L: Fractionating the left frontal response to tools: dissociable effects of motor experience and lexical competition. Journal of cognitive neuroscience 18(2): 267-77, Feb 2006.

Kable Joseph W, Kan Irene P, Wilson Ashley, Thompson-Schill Sharon L, Chatterjee Anjan: Conceptual representations of action in the lateral temporal cortex. Journal of cognitive neuroscience 17(12): 1855-70, Dec 2005.

Kable Joseph W, Lease-Spellmeyer Jessica, Chatterjee Anjan: Neural substrates of action event knowledge. Journal of cognitive neuroscience 14(5): 795-805, Jul 2002.

Kable J W, Murrin L C, Bylund D B: In vivo gene modification elucidates subtype-specific functions of alpha(2)-adrenergic receptors. The Journal of pharmacology and experimental therapeutics 293(1): 1-7, Apr 2000.

Justice J B, Danek K S, Kable J W, Barker E L, Blakely R D: Voltammetric approaches to kinetics and mechanism of the norepinephrine transporter. Advances in pharmacology (San Diego, Calif.) 42: 191-4, 1998.

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Last updated: 04/20/2012
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