Join us next week November 4th, 2015 for our talk with Dr. Chib , Assistant Professor at the Department of Department of Bioengineering, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Pizza, coffee and cookies are served.
For visitors from outside Mason - Parking is best in the Shenandoah Parking Garage ( Bldg. 43 on the campus map). The seminar will be in the Nguyen Engineering Building, Rm. 4201:  http://info.gmu.edu/Maps/FairfaxMap14lttrClr

Bioengineering Seminar
November 4th, 2015 from 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
ENGR 4201

Speaker: Vikram Chib, PhD - Assistant Professor, Department of Bioengineering, University of Pittsburgh
Seminar title: Paradoxical Performance for Monetary Incentives

Biography
Vikram Chib is an Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Associate Faculty at the Carey School of Business, and a member of the Kennedy Krieger Institute. His research is focused on understanding how incentives influence human neural responses and behavioral performance. Vikram obtained his bachelors degree in bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh, and earned an MS and PhD in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University. Following his PhD, Vikram was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Fellow at Advanced Telecommunications Research (ATR) in Kyoto, Japan. Before coming to Johns Hopkins, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Division of Biology and Biological Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and a member of the Computation & Neural Systems and Behavioral & Social Neuroscience programs.

Abstract

It is widely assumed that large financial incentives will increase a worker’s motivation, which, in turn, will elicit improved behavioral performance. However, recent behavioral experiments suggest a more idiosyncratic interplay between incentives and performance: when executing skilled tasks, an individual’s performance increases as the level of incentive increases only up to a point, after which greater incentives paradoxically decrease performance. Despite the ubiquity of performance-based incentive schemes, the neural and psychological underpinnings of the relationship between incentives and performance are not well understood. In this talk I will present functional brain imaging data that was obtained while subjects performed a skilled motor task for varying levels of monetary incentive. I found that ventral striatal signals during the motor task were predictive of subjects’ performance decrements for large incentives.
Furthermore, an independent measure of subjects’ preferences for avoiding losses as compared to equal magnitude gains (i.e., loss aversion) was predictive of striatal responses and behavioral decrements. These results are indicative of a neural mechanism underlying ‘choking’ when the stakes are high: the ventral striatum encodes the prospect of losing an incentive at the time of task performance, and the severity of this loss aversion induces performance decrements. Finally, I will show how accounting for a subject’s loss aversion during incentive mechanism design can ameliorate performance decrements for large incentives. These findings illustrate how the field of neuroeconomics can inform neuropsychological and economic theories, and have practical applications for the improvement of performance and productivity in daily life.
This multi-institutional work has been supported by the NIH- NIH/ 1R21NS080031-01A1, NIH 1R21NS088256:,  NIH 2 R01 NS042646‐04 and the  University of Pittsburgh ADRC Brain Bank.


Claudia Borke
Academic Program Coordinator
Volgenau School of Engineering, Department of Bioengineering
3800 Nguyen Engineering Building, 1G5
4400 University Drive
Fairfax, VA 22030
Phone: (703) 993-4190
Fax: (703) 993-2077