Jaime J. Castrellon
Hello! I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience (Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience area). My primary affiliation is with the Motivated Cognition & Aging Brain Lab under the mentorship of Gregory Samanez-Larkin, Ph.D.
Research Areas
- Basic mechanisms of motivation and decision making
- What brain circuits support valuation mechanisms?
- How do individual differences in dopamine neurotransmission affect how people weigh benefits and costs?
- What role does dopamine play in prosocial decisions and strategic social learning?
- How do neural circuits support context-specific motivation in affiliative and competitive social environments?
- Translation to everyday life
- Does neural function shape spontaneous decisions outside the lab?
- How do experiences with discrimination and power dynamics in the workplace motivate prosocial choices?
- What are the mechanisms and consequences of personal and systemic bias in law and criminal justice?
- How and when do narratives shape economic and legal decisions?
Tools/Techniques
- Neuroimaging (fMRI, PET)
- Human pharmacology
- Computational modeling
- Ecological momentary assessment
- Natural language processing
- Public data/tweet scraping
- Computer vision