Humanities Faculty

Steven R. Quartz

Associate Professor of Philosophy

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Research interests

Impact of neuroscience advances for many of the traditional problems of mind, ranging from a neurally plausible theory of mental representation, the origin of knowledge, to the formal learning properties of neurally constrained developing systems.

Research Statement

The underlying motivation for my research is that many traditional debates in philosophy and the behavioral sciences can now be reframed and adjudicated through the application of advances in brain science. The broader goal is to integrate these approaches to create novel approaches to the humanities, such as neuroaesthetics, and social sciences, such as neuroeconomics.

Over the last five years, I have obtained approximately $2.5M of funding for my research, and now have a lab of approximately 10 members funded through the National Science Foundation, The Packard Foundation, and the Moore Foundation. Our research incorporates functional brain imaging, computational modeling, and experimental neurobiology and centers on issues of how the brain represents value to guide decision-making and adaptive behavior. Our current results include finding that low-level decision-making (sensory integration) is statistically optimal from a Bayesian perspective; finding human evidence for the central hypothesis of expected utility theory that the brain represents separately expected reward and risk; using a novel fMRI approach called hyperscanning (simultaneously scanning n persons interacting in real time) to find the neural correlates of trust and strategic choice; finding how the dynamics of neural development underlie a powerful form of learning we call `constructive' learning; and finding how reward-related structures underlie moral decision-making, moral responsibility, and moral blame.

In the near future, we plan to expand our study of moral decision-making and risk perception in a study of moral development and with special populations (anti-social personality disorder and bipolar disorder). Our goal is to better understand the nature of free choice, moral competence, and the social brain.

Publications

Naked Neurons: Uncovering the Mystery of Who We Are, with T. J. Sejnowski. Harper Collins: in press.

The Constructivist Brain. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 3 (1999): 48--57.

The Neural Basis of Cognitive Development: A Constructivist Manifesto, with T. J. Sehnowski. Brain and Behavioral Sciences, 20 (1997): 537--596.