Eva Pool
Function: Professeure assistante
Group name: Affect Learning and Decisions Lab
Group type: Main
Affiliations: Psychology Section
Domains: Affective and Social Neurosciences
Research activities
We study the fundamental mechanisms of the role of affect in learning and decision making using psychophysiological, behavioral, and neuroimaging techniques. Our research revolves around three main research lines.
The first research line focuses and emotion and reward processing in humans: Rewards are a key driver of learning and behavior. In this line of research, we investigate the affective processes involved in how humans process rewards and learn from them.
The second research line focuses on affective learning: Learning to attribute affective value to our environment and to update it is a skill that shapes how we feel, think and behave. In our research, we try to parse mechanisms involved in this process, using powerful affective stimuli such as odors and tastes.
The third research line focuses on affect and metal health. Reward seeking behaviors can become problematic. Our research aims to understand how and why the human brain is vulnerable to situations where choice behavior is hijacked in service of outcomes that are no longer valued by the individual.
Key publications
Neural substrates of parallel devaluation-sensitive and devaluation-insensitive Pavlovian learning in humans.
Differential contributions of ventral striatum subregions to the motivational and hedonic components of affective processing of reward.
Multicomponential affective processes modulating food-seeking behaviors.
Differential influence of habit components on compulsive and problematic reward-seeking behavior.
Behavioural evidence for parallel outcome-sensitive and outcome-insensitive Pavlovian learning systems in humans.
Contact
Faculté de psychologie et sciences de l’éducation
Université de Genève
Email: Eva.Pool@unige.ch