My Ph.D at the Affective Brain Lab explored how valence – whether a piece of news is good or bad – influences the extent to which information is integrated and used to revise beliefs about ourself, our future and the future of those around us. Alongside this I pursued a separate strand of research examining the role of emotional adaptation in dishonesty (read more about this project here).
I am excited to continue these areas of research and others as I continue my career as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute.
Contact: Contact: ngarrett (at) princeton.edu (email)
Website: www.neilgarrett.org
Publications
Garrett, N., Lazzaro, S., Ariely, D. & Sharot, T. (2016) The brain adapts to dishonesty. Nature Neuroscience.
Garrett, N. & Sharot, T. (in press) Optimistic Update Bias Holds Firm: Three Tests of Robustness Following Shah et al (for a concise version of this paper, see: The Myth of a Pessimistic View of Optimistic Belief Updating – a Commentary on Shah et al. SSRN.)
Garrett, N. & Sharot, T. (2016) Optimistic Update for Positive Life Events? An Unbiased Test, SSRN.
Sharot, T. & Garrett, N. (2016) Forming Beliefs: Why Valence Matters, Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 20(1).
Moutsiana, C., Charpentier, C., Garrett, N., Cohen, M.X. & Sharot, T. (2015) Human frontal-subcortical circuit and asymmetric belief updating, Journal of Neuroscience. 35(42): 14077-14085.
Garrett, N., Sharot, T., Faulkner P., Korn C. W., Roiser J. P. & Dolan R. J. (2014) Losing the rose tinted glasses: neural substrates of unbiased belief updating in depression. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8:639.
Garrett, N. & Sharot, T. (2014) How robust is the optimistic update bias for estimating self-risk and population base rates? PLoS ONE, 9(6): e98848.
Charpentier, C., Moutsiana, C., Garrett, N. & Sharot, T. (2014) The Brain’s Temporal Dynamics from a Collective Decision to Individual Action. Journal of Neuroscience, 34(17): 5816-5823.
Moutsiana, C., Garrett, N., Clarke, R.C., Lotto, R.B., Blakemore, S.J. & Sharot, T. (2013) Human development of the ability to learn from bad news. Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, 110 (41): 16396–16401.
De Martino, B., Fleming, S., Garrett, N. & Dolan, R. (2013). Confidence in value-based choice. Nature Neuroscience, 16, 105–110.