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Lab News
JUNE 2022
New paper is out in Learning & Memory. Determining the effects of training duration on the behavioral expression of habitual control in humans: a multilaboratory investigation.
JUNE 2021
Congratulations to Alon Itzkovitch for getting accepted to the direct Ph.D. program in the Neurobiology department!
MAY 2021
New paper is out in Learning & Memory. Memory for individual items is related to nonreinforced preference change.
MAY 2021
New publication is out in Journal of Neuroscience. A Preferential Role for Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex in Assessing “the Value of the Whole” in Multiattribute Object Evaluation.
MAY 2021
Congratulations to Maya Bar-Or for getting accepted to the Ph.D. program in Sagol School of Neuroscience!
SEPTEMBER 2020
Congratulations to Michal Gabay and Rani Gera for being awarded the Minducate Ph.D fellowship!
MAY 2020
New article is published in Nature! Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams.
MAY 2020
New article is published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences! A Neural Pathway for Nonreinforced Preference Change.
FEBRUARY 2020
Congratulations to Michal Gabay and Tom Salamon for being awarded the Minducate Ph.D fellowship!
November 2018
Nadav Aridan presented a poster at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego.
October 2018
Congratulations to Tom Salomon for being awarded again the Minducate Ph.D fellowship!
October 2018
Congratulations to Rani Gera and Michal Gabay for their winning project team at the EMEA workshop in London!
October 2018
Tom Salomon presented a poster at the 16th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroeconomics in Philadelphia.
August 2018
Rotem Botvinik-Nezer participated in the NeuroHackademy Summer School Program in neuroimaging and data science held at the University of Washington eScience Institute in Seattle.
June 2018
Congratulations to Tom Salomon for being awarded the prestigious Lev-Zion scholarship for outstanding Ph.D. students!
June 2018
Rotem Botvinik-Nezer and Tom Salomon presented posters at the 24th Annual Meeting OHBM Conference in Singapore.
June 2018
Welcome and good luck to our visiting summer students Aliza Tawil and Sharon Agai!
May 2018
Congrats to Rotem Botvinik-Nezer for being awarded the Sagol School of Neuroscience and the Adams Super Center for Brain Studies travel grants!
May 2018
Congratulations to Michal Gabay for getting accepted to the Ph.D. program in Sagol School of Neuroscience.
March 2018
Congratulations to Rani Gera for winning third place in the Best Poster Competition at the ISBP Conference, Kfar Blum.
November 2017
Our very own Nadav Aridan won first place in the Science Slam competition held in Berlin!
October 2017
Congratulations to Rotem Botvinik-Nezer for winning the Tel-Aviv University Global Research & Training Fellowship (GRTF) for the international visit and collaboration with Prof. Daphna Shohamy, Columbia University, New York.
October 2017
Nadav Aridan and Rotem Botvinik-Nezer presented posters at the 13th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroeconomics in Toronto.
June 2017
Tom Salomon presented a poster at the 23rd Annual Meeting of OHBM in Vancouver, Canada.
May 2017
Congratulations to Oren Kobo for winning a travel fellowship from the Sagol School of Neuroscience.
May 2017
Congratulations to Tom Salomon for winning the Anat Krauskopf and the Sagol School of Neuroscience travel grants!
May 2017
Congratulations to Rani Gera and Oren Kobo for getting accepted to the Ph.D. program in the Sagol School of Neuroscience!
MAY 2020
Go check our new publication in Nature: Variability in the analysis of a single neuroimaging dataset by many teams.
January 2017
Congratulations to Rotem Botvinik-Nezer for winning the Sagol School of Neuroscience and the Adams Super Center for Brain Studies travel grants.
LATEST PUBLICATIONS
Abstract: Different types of rewards such as food and money can similarly drive our behavior owing to shared brain pro-cesses encoding their subjective value. However, while the value of money is abstract and needs to be learned, the value of food is rooted in the innate processing of sensory properties and nutritional utilization. Yet, the actual consumption of food and the receipt of money have never been directly contrasted in the same experiment, ques- tioning what unique neural processes differentiate those reward types. To fill this gap, we examined the distinct and common neural responses to the delivery of food and monetary rewards during fMRI. In a novel experimental approach, we parametrically manipulated the subjective value of food and mone- tary rewards by modulating the quantities of administered palatable milkshake and monetary gains. The receipt of increasing amounts of milkshake and money recruited the ventral striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, previously associated with value encoding. Notably, the consumption and the subsequent evaluation of increasing quantities of milkshake relative to money revealed an extended recruitment of brain regions related to taste, somatosensory processing, and salience. Moreover, we detected a decline of reward encoding in the ventral tegmental area, nucleus accumbens, and vmPFC, indicating that these regions may be susceptible to time-dependent effects upon accumulation of food and money rewards. Relative to monetary gains, the consumption and evaluation of palatable milkshakes engaged complex neu-ral processing over and above value tracking, emphasizing the critical contribution of taste and other sensory properties to the processing of food rewards. Furthermore, our results highlight the need to closely monitor metabolic states and neural responses to the accumulation of rewards to pinpoint the mechanisms underlying time-dependent dynamics of reward-related processing.