Research Interests

James Hyman's research focuses on information encoding in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and connected subcortical areas. His lab records the activity of large ensembles of single neurons along with oscillatory activity in multiple brain areas while rodents complete an array of cognitive, emotional and memory tasks. He uses advanced mathematical techniques to unravel the complex neural coding schemes employed to convey information related to reward probability, behavioral context, working memory, tracking time and outcome expectancy. Additional research topics concentrate on interactions between the mPFC and multiple other neural areas including: the hippocampal long term memory system, the ventral tegmental area reward circuit, the locus coeruleus attentional system and the amygdalar emotional response system.