The laboratory of Alan Stocker studies the effects of sequential decision making in perception. For example, the selection of a target affects the subsequent percept of the target's orientation: the perceived angle relative to the distractor orientation is larger than it actually is.
People differ in the degree to which they will choose larger, delayed rewards over smaller, immediate ones. Joe Kable and colleagues have found that activity in specific parts of the brain, striatum and medial prefrontal cortex, reflects the subjective value that particular person places on future rewards.
Work done in the Thompson-Schill Lab shows increased activity in the left frontal operculum when healthy volunteers were asked to selectively retrieve an object's name among competing alternatives
Harvey Grill and lab members have shown that leptin, a hormone made in fat, acts on the same neurons in the brain that respond to signals arising from food in the stomach. Immunohistochemical images of **green** pSTAT leptin responsive cells, **red** c-Fos stomach distention responsive cells and yellow neurons responsive to both signals