Talk: Daniel Martins, King’s College London (4 March 2021)

2nd March 2021 Events, Anastasia Christakou

Thursday 4 March 2021, 3pm GMT

Oxytocin modulation of the neurocomputational mechanisms underlying prosocial learning

Humans often act on the best interest of others. While questions remain about the intrinsic motives that drive human prosocial behaviour, it is generally accepted that in order to behave prosocially humans should be able to learn which of their actions impact positively on others. But how do we learn the impact our decisions have on others? What neurochemical systems support such social learning processes? In this talk, I will showcase some of our latest work investigating how different doses of intranasal oxytocin (OT), a neuropeptide involved in social affiliation, impact on the way people learn to benefit themselves (self-learning) or others (prosocial learning). We applied a range of neuroimaging and modelling approaches, including computational models of reinforcement learning, model-based functional resonance imaging and dynamic causal modelling to dissect how intranasal oxytocin impact on the way the brain encodes the different neurocomputational processes taking place during prosocial reinforcement learning in humans.

Join in the neuromethods channel in the CINN Community team, or contact cinn@reading.ac.uk.