Scott Huettel, Ph.D.[Edit Page]
Associate Director for Cognitive Neuroscience
Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience
Ph. D., 1999, Duke University (Experimental Psychology)
Research Interests
neuroeconomics; executive processing; prediction; decision-making; attention; perception; consciousness.
Research Statement
My research investigates executive processing, roughly defined as the top-down control of behavior. I am interested in how prefrontal cortical regions contribute to the dynamic selection of behavior based on moment-to-moment processing of stimulus information. In collaborations with members of the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center, Psychiatry, and Psychology, I examine different forms of executive processing, including decision making, working memory, and response selection. I am also interested in understanding the mechanisms underlying controlled judgment and attention. Recent studies have begun to investigate the relation between decision and reward processes, an emerging research topic coming to be known as "neuroeconomics".
For the past few years, I have also worked on adapting psychological task designs to event-related fMRI, through studies of timing, refractory, and signal-noise properties of the fMRI BOLD hemodynamic response.
Recent Representative Publications
Wang L, Mullette-Gillman O, Gadde KM, Kuhn CM, McCarthy G & Huettel SA (2009, In Press). The effect of acute tryptophan depletion on emotional distraction and subsequent memory. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Clithero JC, Tankersley D & Huettel SA (2008, In Press). Foundations of Neuroeconomics: From Philosophy to Practice. PLoS Biology.
Goyer JP, Woldorff MG & Huettel SA (2008). Rapid electrophysiological brain responses are influenced by both valence and magnitude of monetary rewards. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 20(11): 2058-2069.
Platt ML & Huettel SA (2008). Risky business: the neuroeconomics of uncertainty. Nature Neuroscience. 11(4): 398-403.
Weber BJ & Huettel SA (2008). The neural substrates of probabilistic and intertemporal decision making. Brain Research. 1234: 104-115.
Tankersley D & Huettel SA (2007). Altruism is associated with an increased neural response to agency. Nature Neuroscience. 10(2): 150-151.
Huettel SA, Stowe CJ, Gordon EM, Warner BT & Platt ML (2006). Neural signatures of economic preferences for risk and ambiguity. Neuron. 49(5): 765-75.
Huettel SA, Song AW & McCarthy G (2005). Decisions under Uncertainty: Probabilistic Context Influences Activation of Prefrontal and Parietal Cortices. Journal of Neuroscience. 25(13): 3304-11.
Madden DJ, Whiting WL, Huettel SA, White LE, MacFall JR & Provenzale JM (2004). Diffusion tensor imaging of adult age differences in cerebral white matter: Relation to response time. NeuroImage. 21(3): 1174-81.
Madden DJ, Whiting W, Cabeza R & Huettel SA (2004). Age-related preservation in top-down attentional guidance during visual search. Psychology and Aging. 19(2): 304-9.
Huettel SA & Misiurek J (2004). Modulation of prefrontal cortex activity by information toward a decision rule. NeuroReport. 15(12): 188-92.
Huettel SA, Obembe OO, Song AW & Woldorff MG (2004). The BOLD fMRI refractory effect is specific to stimulus attributes: Evidence from a visual motion paradigm. NeuroImage. 23(1): 402-8.
Huettel SA, Misiurek J, Jurkowski AJ & McCarthy G (2004). Dynamic and strategic aspects of executive processing. Brain Research. 1000(1-2): 78-84.
Huettel SA & McCarthy G (2004). What is odd in the oddball task? Prefrontal cortex is activated by dynamic changes in response strategy. Neuropsychologia. 42(3): 379-386.
Madden DJ, Whiting W, Provenzale JM & Huettel SA (2004). Age-related changes in neural activity during visual target detection measured by fMRI. Cerebral Cortex. 14(2): 143-155.
Huettel SA, McKeown MJ, Song AW, Hart S, Spencer DD, Allison T & McCarthy G (2004). Linking hemodynamic and electrophysiological measures of brain activity: Evidence from functional MRI and intracranial field potentials. Cerebral Cortex. 14(2): 165-173.
McKeown MJ, Varadarajan V, Huettel SA & McCarthy G (2002). Deterministic and stochastic features of fMRI data: implications for analysis of event-related experiments. Journal of Neuroscience Methods. 118(2): 103-113.
Due DL, Huettel SA, Hall WG & Rubin DC (2002). Activation in Mesolimbic and Visuospatial Neural Circuits Elicited by Smoking Cues: Evidence From Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging . The American Journal of Psychiatry. 159(6): 954-960.
Huettel SA, Mack PB & McCarthy G (2002). Perceiving patterns in random series: dynamic processing of sequence in prefrontal cortex. Nature Neuroscience. 5(5): 485-490.
Duke University Academic Affiliations
Department of Psychiatry, Neurobiology, and Psychology
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
Center for Neuroeconomic Studies