Collaborative Research: Situational Learning and Decision Making

Being able to predict behaviors of other people is important to successfully navigate the social world. Prior research shows that one major way to achieve this is by learning about other people’s personality traits. This project explores how individuals learn not only about others’ personality traits but also about the situations that inform people’s actions, and in turn use situational learning in decision making. Impacts of this project include research training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students, and dissemination of findings to the public. This project aims to characterize how individuals learn about situations and explore how different life experiences influence this process. The research team leverages behavioral methods, advanced neuroimaging techniques and computational modeling to (1) identify the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in situational and trait learning and to (2) examine the role that situational and trait learning play in reasoning and decision-making across different contexts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.