About
Tali Sharot is an affiliated Professor in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and a Professor and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London and The Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. She heads the Affective Brain Lab. She has a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from NYU and a BA in economics and psychology from Tel Aviv University. She received fellowships from the Wellcome Trust, the Forum of European Philosophy and the British Academy, among others.
Research
How do people arrive at their beliefs and make decisions? We are constantly flooded with information that can shape our beliefs about the world. The brain must sift through the available evidence and integrate information to form beliefs. Our lab seeks to understand this process in psychological, computational and biological terms. We are particularly interested in how motivation and social factors influence it. The work sits at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience and economics. This interdisciplinary approach provides us with a large range of scientific methods to answer our research questions, including behavioral experiments, computational modeling, neuroimaging, pharmacological manipulations, and big data analysis.
A recent line of work in the lab focuses on investigating how human-technology interactions alter and reflect human decision-making, mood and beliefs. As part of this research program we are working on using digital footprints for mental health assessment and diagnosis.
Publications
Bromberg-Martin E.S. & Sharot T. (2020). The Value of Beliefs. Neuron, 106(4), 561-565.
Sharot, T. & Sunstein C.R., (2020). How People Decide What They Want to Know. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-6.
Kappes, A., Harvey, A., Lohrenz, T., Montague, R. & Sharot, T . (2020) Confirmation Bias in the Utilization of Others’ Opinion Strength. Nature Neuroscience, 23(1), 130-137.
Charpentier, C., Bromberg-Martin E., & Sharot T. (2018) Valuation of Knowledge and Ignorance in Mesolimbic Reward Circuitry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(31), E7255-E7264.
Garrett, N., Lazzaro, S., Ariely, D. & Sharot, T. (2016) The brain adapts to dishonesty. Nature Neuroscience, 19(12), 1727–1732.