The Value of Control: Choice and Adaptation within a Social Hierarchy Game

Dominant status is an important resource in social species, including our own. It plays a critically role in intraspecific competition, serving to motivate mobility within dominance hierarchy, or maintain the extant hierarchy. Explaining and predicting dominance-related behavior is a goal in many social and biological sciences. To date, research on human dominance has generally focused on cognitive functions such as emotion regulation or response inhibition. However, dominance may also reflect functions and neural circuits related to reward and adaptation — mechanisms critical for survival and thriving. Here combining fMRI, computational modeling, and economic experiments and theories, I show that models adapted from game theory are able to capture the neural processing of reward and social learning within interpersonal competition. Using these algorithms, I then go on to illustrate how individual differences in dominance and social learning are mechanistically connected at both neural and behavioral levels. These results point to a neurobehavioral signature of human dominance, which can be objectively quantified, tested, and ultimately applied as individualized metrics with potential prognostic or predictive utility for social pathologies in psychiatric and developmental disorders.

Biography

Lusha Zhu, Principal Investigator, School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, PKU-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, IDG/McGovern Brain Institute, Peking University, China. 

Dr. Zhu received her bachelor’s degree in Physics from Shandong University, master's degree in Economics from Peking University, and Ph.D. degree in Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Before joining Peking University in 2015, she worked as an Associate Consultant at Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley from 2010-2011,  and as a postdoctoral fellow at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute from 2011-2015. 

The research program of Dr. Lusha Zhu’s lab focuses on understanding the neurobiological foundation of social decision-making at the mechanistic level. Her work uses neuroscience techniques (e.g. fMRI, lesion, and drug manipulation) and models of economic choice to identify neural substrates of complex social behavior, both in healthy populations and individuals with psychiatric illness. She has applied this approach to examine neurocomputational underpinnings of competition and corporation in humans, as well as how such processes go awry in patients with PTSD, major depression, and brain lesions.