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| Home > Zentren > Zentrum für Experimentelle Medizin > Institut für Systemische Neurowissenschaften > Research group: Decision neuroscience and prospection

Research group: Decision neuroscience and prospection

Overview

Our research is concerned with how we envision the future, how we remember the past, and how these processes affect the choices we make. One focus is how we make decisions about outcomes that are delayed in time. Typically, humans and animals de-value future rewards as a function of the time to their delivery. Many psychiatric conditions (e.g. addiction) are associated with a hypersensitivity to such delays, and we are interested in the underlying neural mechanisms. Vividly imagining the future, on the other hand, can make people less impulsive, and we study the underlying processes. Naturally, we are very interested in regions of the reward circuit such as the ventral striatum, orbitofrontal cortex and midbrain, but also in medial temporal lobe regions such as the hippocampus and adjacent structures. We explore the roles of these networks in memory, prospection and decision-making.

We are associated with the IMAGEN project, and in this context examine how reward processing changes across the life span.

Our weekly lab meetings take place jointly with the memory and decision-making group of Tobias Sommer.

Methods: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), cognitive modeling.

Research topics

• Decision neuroscience: inter-temporal and risky choice
• Decision-making and reward-processing in addiction
• Memory, prospection and the medial temporal lobe

Key publications

• Menz MM, Buchel C, Peters J: Sleep-deprivation is associated with attenuated parametric valuation and conflict signals in the midbrain during value-based decision making. Journal of Neuroscience 2012; 32(20):6937-46
• Peters J, Buchel C: Episodic future thinking reduces reward delay discounting through an enhancement of prefrontal-mediotemporal interactions. Neuron 2010; 66:138-148
• Peters J, Buchel C: Overlapping and distinct neural systems code for subjective value during inter-temporal and risky decision-making. Journal of Neuroscience 2009; 29(50):15727-34

• Miedl SF*, Peters J*, Buchel C: Altered neural reward representations in pathological gamblers revealed by delay and probability discounting. Archives of General Psychiatry 2012; 69(2):177-186
• Peters J, Bromberg U, Schneider S et al: Lower ventral striatal responses during reward anticipation in adolescent smokers. American Journal of Psychiatry 2011; 168(5):540-549

• Schultz H, Sommer T, Peters J: Direct evidence for domain-sensitive functional subregions in human entorhinal cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 2012; 32(14):4716-4723
• Peters J, Suchan B, Koster O, Daum I: Domain-specific retrieval of source information in the medial temporal lobe. European Journal of Neuroscience 2007; 26(5):1333-1343