Tom Solomon
Department of Neurobiology, Faculty of Life Sciences
The Project
PI: Dr. Tom Schonberg, Department of neurobiology and Sagol School of Neuroscience.
Behavioral change forms the basic building block of any learning process - from the bright undergraduate student who acquires new academic knowledge, to a baby learning to differentiate delicious sweets from less desired food options. Most behavior change interventions rely on external-reinforcements or self-control, but these often fail in the long run. Recently, the Cue-Approach Training (CAT) paradigm has been developed, to modify behavior without external reinforcements. In this paradigm, the mere-association of image stimuli with a neutral-cue and a speeded response leads to preference changes, lasting months. While the task had been well-replicated as an overall group effect, recent work highlighted the variability across individual participants performing the task; while some participants demonstrate a strong behavioral change effect, others do not. This phenomenon corresponds with real-world variability whereby some individuals learn better than others. Therefore, in the currently ongoing project, we will utilize this unique non-reinforced preference change paradigm as a rich platform to study the behavioral and neural markers that underlie variability in value construction and modification. We have been using computational modelling of behavioral data and fMRI, to identify markers for effective behavioral change. Using Bayesian modelling of the behavior as well as fMRI measured brain activations during the learning process, can aim to predict consequent behavioral change effects. The outcomes of this research can have a strong impact on our basic understanding of how the brain constructs and changes values as well as on development of personalized learning tools.
About Me
Tom Salomon is a fourth year PhD student at the department of neurobiology in Tel Aviv university. He has started his PhD in the lab of Dr. Tom Schonberg, following completion of his M.Sc. at the Sagol school of neuroscience in 2014 (summa cum laude), and B.Sc. studies in biology (summa cum laude) and psychology (cum laude) with emphasis on neuroscience in 2011.
In his PhD research, Tom studies novel mechanisms of preference construction and modification using a unique paradigm for behavioral change without external-reinforcement. His work focuses on understanding the neural basis of behavioral change using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), behavioral analyses and computational modelling. During his PhD, Tom has been collaborating with multiple investigators in Israel and abroad including Prof. Maya Tamir from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Dr. Liad Mudrik from Tel Aviv university, and Prof. Nathaniel Daw from Princeton University.
He has two first author manuscripts – one in Scientific Reports, and recently another imaging study in Human Brain Mapping. He also co-authored an imaging paper which has been recently published in Cerebral Cortex. His findings shed light on basic neural mechanisms for value encoding and modification.