Nassar Lab
Principal Investigator: Matthew Nassar
Institution: Brown University (Providence, RI)
Primary Subfield: Neuroscience
Recruitment Status: ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Abstract Humans display tremendous flexibility in their everyday behavior, adjusting it rapidly when appropriate (i.e. adopting mask wearing after onset of Covid-19), but not when inappropriate (i.e. continuing to drive after involvement in an unavoidable car accident). Recent work has highlighted the role that transient fluctuations in arousal, thought to be mediated by activation of the locus coeruleus norepinephrine (LC/NE) system, play in behavioral adjustments. Increasing NE pharmacologically promotes behavioral updating in rodents and peripheral measures of arousal, such as pupil diameter and P300 orienting response, provide a window into the dynamics that underlie these behavioral adjustments in humans. A mechanistic understanding of these processes could provide a valuable therapeutic target for a wide range of psychiatric disorders in which behavioral flexibility is impaired. However, current theory falls short, in part because it fails to account for the contextual nature of arousal: that heightened arousal reflects more behavioral adjustment in some settings or individuals, but less in others. We believe that previous computational accounts of NE have likely fail…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R01MH126971-05: Representational dynamics for flexible learning in complex environments (2026)
- 5R01MH139351-03: CRCNS: Investigating the Neurocomputational Mechanisms of Belief Updating (2026)
- 5R01MH139351-02: CRCNS: Investigating the Neurocomputational Mechanisms of Belief Updating (2025)
- 5R01MH126971-04: Representational dynamics for flexible learning in complex environments (2025)
- 3R01MH126971-03S1: Representational dynamics for flexible learning in complex environments (2024)
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