It's all how you look at it: Construal is reflected in brain and behavior

Dr. Peter Balsam is a professor of Psychology at Columbia University.  

Individuals construe situations differently.The same individual canconstrue a given situation in different ways at different times. Our formaltheories typically assume that there is one "true" way in which experiencesare construed. In the case of associative learning theories it is assumedthat animals construe the world as a series of discrete events (e.g. Aconditioned stimulus is paired with an unconditioned stimulus). Othertheories assume that the temporal structure of experience guides behavior(e.g. Choice is base on rates of reward). Research from our lab suggeststhat our subjects do not always construe the world in the same way asexperimenters and theorists. Additionally, construal is flexible anddependent on experience. We argue that striatal dopamine  rapidly reflectsthe way in which experiences are construed and that these changes in thebrain happen long before any behavioral changes take place. The next bigchallenge will be to understand how the neural representation ofknowledge gets translated into motivation and action.

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Hosted by Dr. Michael Drew

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