Ian Roberts

• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Toronto

People selectively help others based on perceptions of their merit or need. Here, we develop a neurocomputational account of how these social perceptions translate into social choice. Using a novel fMRI social perception task, we show that both merit and need perceptions recruited the brain’s social inference network. A behavioral computational mod...

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...

People selectively help others based on perceptions of their merit or need. Here, we develop a neurocomputational account of how these social perceptions translate into social choice. Using a novel fMRI social perception task, we show that both merit and need perceptions recruited the brain’s social inference network. A behavioral computational mod...

People selectively help others based on perceptions of their merit or need. Here, we develop a neurocomputational account of how these social perceptions translate into social choice. Using a novel fMRI social perception task, we show that both merit and need perceptions recruited the brain’s social inference network. A behavioral computational mod...

People selectively help others based on perceptions of their merit or need. Here, we develop a neurocomputational account of how these social perceptions translate into social choice. Using a novel fMRI social perception task, we show that both merit and need perceptions recruited the brain’s social inference network. A behavioral computational mod...

People selectively help others based on perceptions of their merit or need. Here, we develop a neurocomputational account of how these social perceptions translate into social choice. Using a novel fMRI social perception task, we show that both merit and need perceptions recruited the brain's social inference network. A behavioral computational mod...

Bermúdez argues that framing effects are rational because particular frames provide goal-consistent reasons for choice and that people exert some control over the framing of a decision-problem. We propose instead that these observations raise the question of whether frame selection itself is a rational process and highlight how constraints in the c...

Decades of research have established the ubiquity and importance of choice biases, such as the framing effect, yet why these seemingly irrational behaviors occur remains unknown. A prominent dual-system account maintains that alternate framings bias choices because of the unchecked influence of quick, affective processes, and findings that time pre...

In recent years interest in integrating the affective and decision sciences has skyrocketed. Immense progress has been made, but the complexities of each field, which can multiply when combined, present a significant obstacle. A carefully defined framework for integration is needed. The shift towards computational modeling in decision science provi...

When choosing whether to act altruistically, people may compare the current option to an idiosyncratic ideal. Prosocial individuals seem to represent deviations from that ideal in the amygdala, but selfish individuals do not. Oxytocin administration makes selfish individuals look more like prosocial individuals, behaviorally and neurally.

Acetaminophen has long been assumed to selectively alleviate physical pain, but recent research has started to reveal its broader psychological effects. Building on this work, we find suggestive evidence that acetaminophen affects the basic social process of trust across a national survey and five lab experiments. In a national community sample (MI...

People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) tend to distrust others. We hypothesized that acetaminophen might reduce distrust in people with high BPD features because disordered affective responses are partially responsible for the interpersonal difficulties of people with BPD features, and acetaminophen has been shown in multiple studies to...

People have a greater desire to date highly attractive partners, which induces intrasexual competition between same-sex individuals. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore whether and how intrasexual competition modulates pain empathy for a same-sex rival and the underlying neural mechanism. Participants were scanne...

Regret and relief are associated with counterfactual thinking and are sensitive to various social contexts. In the present fMRI study, we investigated the neural basis for regret and relief and how social context (following vs. not following advice) modulate them by employing a sequential risk-taking task. Participants were asked to open a series o...

Firestone & Scholl (F&S) rely on three problematic assumptions about the mind (modularity, reflexiveness, and context-insensitivity) to argue cognition does not fundamentally influence perception. We highlight evidence indicating that perception, cognition, and emotion are constructed through overlapping, distributed brain networks characterized by...