James Howard

James Howard is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Brandeis University, affiliated with the Volen National Center for Complex Systems. His research examines how the human brain constructs outcome expectations to guide decision-making.

Research focuses on chemosensory rewards, using neuroimaging and non-invasive brain stimulation to study associative learning mechanisms. Investigations analyze functional network coordination supporting learning processes and how network perturbations affect decision guidance.

Recent publications investigate orbitofrontal cortex functions in reward processing, identity-specific reward coding, and sensory prediction errors. Studies combine behavioral paradigms with neuroimaging and stimulation techniques to establish causal relationships.