Justin Lopez-Roque

Program: Neurosciences

Current advisor: Adam Kepecs, PhD

Undergraduate university: Washington University, 2023

Enrollment year: 2023

Research summary
Studying Human Motivational Decision making when making effortful choices utilizing gamified effort and reward tasks

Studying Human Motivational decision making when making effortful choices. Research focuses on the understanding that motivation is derived from the Reward a person might gain from an action and the effort cost of said action. Utilizing tasks and models tested in mice, I am translating tasks for human use. The end goal is to have a task that can simultaneously distinguish between sensitivities to effort or reward within an individual, and to then apply that to current understandings of apathy and anhedonia to have a task that can help quantify these features for clinical use. Research is also focused on defining behaviors and conditions that are trans-diagnostic and lack consistent definitions across fields. Research primarily focuses on the intersection between behavioral neuroscience and human psychology, along with integrating those aspects with modern task design to improve naturalistic study of human behavior.

Graduate publications
Thompson KI, Schneider CJ, Lopez-Roque JA, Wakschlag LS, Karim HT, Perlman SB. 2024 A network approach to the investigation of childhood irritability: probing frustration using social stimuli. J Child Psychol Psychiatry, 65(7):959-972. PMCID: PMC11161318