This summer, Jaime Castrellon joined UCLA’s Department of Psychology as their newest assistant professor. Castrellon arrives with an impressive set of skills, tools, and approaches to study the brain, motivation, and how we make everyday decisions.
In this Q&A, Castrellon shares how he got into this line of research and why he chose to come to UCLA.
How did you become interested in studying decision-making?
I was initially on the path to becoming a lawyer, but along the way I became interested in how people make decisions in legal environments– for example, how jurors make complex decisions.
We trust jurors to make consequential choices, and that depends on how they integrate different pieces of information. How are they thinking about social information that may be biasing them, and how do they value that? I started asking questions like these, then fell in love with research.
As a researcher, I want to understand the brain mechanisms that support complex decision making, like kind of decisions that jurors have to make, and understanding how these decisions are made in specific contexts.
What are the big questions you aim to answer through research?
My lab is broadly interested in understanding how and why people make different kinds of decisions. How do they come to value the things that are important to them? How might the incorporation of specific social information bias their decisions?
Understanding how people place values on different kinds of rewards can provide insight into decisions that go awry. For example, with drug addiction, an individual may overvalue certain sensations of reward, to an extent that they probably shouldn’t be.
My lab is also interested in understanding how people’s values change with age, and how that factors into their decision making. For example, over the course of their lifespans, we know that people place greater value on social rewards, like their community, friends and family. While this is generally a good thing, becoming more attuned to social rewards might come with risks, like greater susceptibility to fraud and scams. Knowing about this shift in values can inform strategies to help reduce some of these risks.
How does your lab study decision-making?
We set up behavioral experiments on the computer for study participants to perform different tasks and make choices. For example, we can give them differing amounts of certain rewards, like virtual money, that they can distribute between themselves and other people. We can then see if their decisions change under different circumstances–for example, if people are making choices for a friend versus a stranger. We compliment these experiments with MRI brain imaging to see what parts of the brain are activated when people are making these kinds of choices.
Another method my lab uses is called “experience sampling”, which gathers more detailed information around decisions that people make in their day-to-day lives. In these studies, participants are set up with daily surveys and tracking devices to measure heart rate and sleep quality.
By combining a person’s physiological state, with their values and social information that they have in mind when weighing a particular decision, we can have a richer understanding of how these contextual inputs influence decision-making.
What factors influenced your decision to join the UCLA Department of Psychology?
1. UCLA’s psychology department has top experts in social and affective neuroscience and the neurobiology of reward processing. These are people with whom I envision collaborating with on new research projects or who can serve as co-advisors to junior scientists in my lab.
2. The collegiality and warmth of all the faculty in the psychology department have made me feel very welcomed during my visit.
3. Unique access to advanced brain imaging tools, like simultaneous fMRI/PET, along with experts who use these tools to study human brain function.
What are some of the things you’re most looking forward to as you start your career at UCLA?
I’m very excited to mentor and teach UCLA students, to get research going in my lab, and to be working with a group of people who are excited to do science and learn.
Our lab will definitely have opportunities for undergraduate research assistants to help advance research in the lab. It’s an opportunity for them to learn about the research that we do and to develop skills if they’re thinking about a career in research.
I’ve been fortunate to have mentors who value empathy, growth, and finding ways to help their mentees become more independent. I really try to work on getting trainees to become independent scientists.
One thing that’s really important to me is listening to my mentees, because it shouldn’t be just them learning from you, but I think it can be a two-way street– mentors can learn a lot from mentees. People in my lab, for example, bring lots of knowledge from their prior experiences that I didn’t have. So when they share that with the lab, we can all learn… and that includes me too.
Earlier this year, Jamie Castrellon was named a “Rising Star” by the Association for Psychological Science, a designation that recognizes outstanding psychologists, in the earliest stages of their research career, whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for continued contributions.