Azadeh Hajihosseini

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Toronto

People often draw on their current affective experience to inform their decisions, yet little is known about the underlying mechanisms of this process. Understanding them has important implications for many big questions in both the affective and decision sciences. Do the same neural circuits that generate affect generate value? What differentiates...

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technolog...

Large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be able to perform new tasks based on a few demonstrations or natural language instructions. While these capabilities have led to widespread adoption, most LLMs are developed by resource-rich organizations and are frequently kept from the public. As a step towards democratizing this powerful technolog...

How does regulatory focus alter attribute value construction (AVC) and evidence accumulation (EA)? We recorded EEG during food choices while participants responded naturally or regulated their choices by attending to health attributes or decreasing attention to taste attributes. Using a drift diffusion model, we predicted the time course of neural...

Recent work on the cognitive regulation of dietary decision making suggests that regulation can alter both the choices that people make in the moment, as well as longer-lasting preferences (Boswell, Sun, Suzuki, & Kober, 2018). However, it is unclear what mechanisms lead to temporary or lingering changes. To address this question, we used fMRI duri...

Reward delivery in reinforcement learning tasks elicits increased beta power in the human EEG over frontal areas of the scalp but it is unclear whether these 20–30 Hz oscillations directly facilitate reward learning. We previously proposed that frontal beta is not specific to reward processing but rather reflects the role of prefrontal cortex in ma...

How do different cognitive self-regulation strategies alter attribute value construction (AVC) and evidence accumulation (EA)? We recorded EEG during food choices while participants responded naturally or regulated their choices by focusing on healthy eating or decreasing their desire for all food. Using a drift diffusion model (DDM), we predicted...

Apathy is a common non-motor symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD) that is difficult to quantify and poorly understood. Some studies have used incentivized motor tasks to assess apathy, as the condition is often associated with a reduction in motivated behavior. Normally event-related desynchronization, a reduction of power in specific frequency band...

Objective: To determine the relation between apathy and neural oscillations in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Background: Apathy in PD, characterized by lack of motivation, is often resistant to therapy, difficult to quantify and poorly understood. Prior studies have used incentivized motor tasks to measure apathy, but it is unclear whether these measu...

Future of Research is an organization dedicated to championing, engaging, and empowering early career researchers (ECRs). The organization was founded in 2014 and has since inspired other groups to advocate for a more equitable and sustainable research enterprise. Here we report the findings of the Future of Research Vancouver Symposium. The goals...

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is commonly associated with cognitive control and decision making, but its specific function is highly debated. To explore a recent theory that the ACC learns the reward values of task contexts (Holroyd & McClure in Psychological Review, 122, 54–83, 2015; Holroyd & Yeung in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 122–1...

Reward-related feedback stimuli have been observed to elicit a burst of power in the beta frequency range over frontal areas of the human scalp. Recent discussions have suggested possible neural sources for this activity but there is a paucity of empirical evidence on the question. Here we recorded EEG from participants while they navigated a virtu...

Reward feedback elicits a briefincrease in power in the high-beta frequency range of the human electroencephalogram (EEG) over frontal areas of the scalp, butthe functional role of this oscillatory activity remains unclear.An observed sensitivity to reward expectation (HajiHosseini, Rodríguez-Fornells, & Marco-Pallarés, 2012) suggests thatreward-re...

Feedback ERN (fERN) and frontal midline theta have both been proposed to index a dopamine-like reinforcement learning signal in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We investigated these proposals by comparing fERN amplitude and theta power with respect to their sensitivities to outcome valence and probability in a previously collected EEG dataset. Bay...