Joni Wallis facts for kids

Joni Wallis is a scientist who studies how our brains work. She is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She focuses on how our brains help us think and make decisions.

Education and Early Discoveries

Joni Wallis earned her first degree in Psychology and Neuroscience from the University of Manchester in 1995. This means she studied how the mind and brain work. Later, she received her advanced degree (PhD) in Experimental Psychology and Anatomy from the University of Cambridge. There, she worked in the lab of Angela C. Roberts.

How the Brain Makes Decisions

After her PhD, Dr. Wallis moved to the United States. She joined the lab of Earl K. Miller to continue her research. She studied the prefrontal cortex, which is like the brain's control center. This part of the brain helps us plan, solve problems, and make good choices. She explored how the prefrontal cortex uses rules to help us decide things.

Understanding Brain Goals

Dr. Wallis's main research helps us understand how the front part of our brain, called the frontal cortex, helps us set and reach goals. She looks at how tiny brain cells, called neurons, work together.

Making decisions means thinking about the good and bad parts of different choices. Dr. Wallis's team has studied how the brain figures out these "costs and benefits." They watched the activity of single neurons in the brain.

Brain's Cost-Benefit Analysis

Her team trained monkeys to make choices that involved different costs. Sometimes the choices needed a lot of effort. Other times, they had to wait a long time for a reward. They found that single neurons in the prefrontal cortex helped the monkeys understand these different costs.

This research built on Dr. Wallis's earlier work. She had found that individual neurons in this brain area could understand many things about a decision. For example, they could know how likely a reward was, how big the reward would be, and how much effort it would take.

Her team also found that different parts of the brain handle different types of information. Neurons that connect sights or sounds to rewards are in the orbitofrontal cortex. Neurons that connect actions to rewards are in the anterior cingulate cortex.

Brain Activity During Choices

Dr. Wallis's group has also studied how decisions happen over time in both humans and monkeys. They used special tools to measure brain activity as people and monkeys made choices. Their findings matched mathematical models of decision-making. This showed a link between how we think about choices and how our brains actually work.

In another study, her team watched how neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex reacted when monkeys considered different options. When thinking about two choices, the groups of neurons for each option would take turns firing. They would switch back and forth before the monkey finally made a decision.

Supporting Brain Health

Dr. Wallis's research is supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health. These grants help her study the orbitofrontal cortex and how brain rhythms help us learn. The main goal of her work is to find better ways to help people with mental illnesses.

She became interested in this field after her PhD supervisor introduced her to patients. These patients had damage to their orbitofrontal cortex. They found it very hard to make decisions, even though other parts of their thinking were fine.

Awards and Honors

• The Marian C. Diamond & Arnold B. Scheibel Fund in Neuroscience, 2020