Affective learning is the individual's ability to attribute affective value to their environment and update it. Through this fundamental process, individuals learn to flexibly identify situations in which it is worth pursuing a reward or avoiding a threat.

In this line of research, we focus our efforts on the identification of the mechanisms involved in affective learning. To this end, we develop methods that combine theoretical frameworks and experimental paradigms developed through the study of animal behavior with psychophysiological techniques and fMRI protocols in healthy human volunteers.

Relevant Publications

Pool, E. R., Pauli, W. M., Kress, C. S., & O’Doherty, J. P. (2019). Behavioural evidence for parallel outcome-sensitive and outcome-insensitive Pavlovian learning systems in humans. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, Article 284.

Pool, E. R., Pauli, W. M., Cross, L., & O’Doherty, J. P. (2023). Neural substrates of parallel devaluation-sensitive and devaluation-insensitive Pavlovian learning in humans. Nature Communications, 14, Article 8057.

Pool, E. R.*, Gera, R.*, Fransen, A.*, Perez, O. D.*, Cremer, A.*, Aleksic, M.*, Tanwisuth, S.*, Quail, S.*, Ceceli, A. O., Manfredi, D. A., Nave, G., Tricomi, E., Balleine, B., Schonberg, T., Schwabe, L., & O'Doherty, J. P. (2022). Determining the effects of training duration on the behavioral expression of habitual control in humans: A multi-laboratory investigation. Learning & Memory, 29, 16- 28.