About

Facing Hierarchies and Dominance: How We Perceive, Learn, and Adapt in Social Worlds

In everyday life, we constantly navigate social hierarchies — judging who holds more powers and influences, when to cooperate, and when to compete. My research examines the brain mechanisms and behavioral strategies that make this possible. Using approaches such as brain stimulation, reinforcement learning models, and innovative tools like digit-tracking, I study how people acquire knowledge about social ranks, adjust to competitive versus cooperative partners, and perceive dominance cues in faces.

The results show that the medial prefrontal cortex plays a causal role in hierarchy learning, that people adapt their behavior differently depending on an opponent’s level of competitiveness, and that even young children display early attentional preferences for less dominant faces. More recently, I have extended this work by investigating how oxytocin — a neuropeptide central to social cognition — modulates the perception of facial dominance, revealing that it can dampen automatic sensitivity to dominance cues during early stages of face processing.

Taken together, this research uncovers the neural and cognitive processes that allow us to perceive, learn, and adapt within the invisible structures of social life — and highlights the subtle biases and mechanisms that shape our everyday interactions.

Qu, C.*, Huang, Y.*, Philippe, R., Cai, S., Derrington, E., Moisan, F., … & Dreher, J. C. (2024). Transcranial direct current stimulation suggests a causal role of the medial prefrontal cortex in learning social hierarchy. Communications Biology, 7(1), 304. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-024-05976-2

Li, S.*, Huang, Y.*, Xu, C., Wu, J., & Qu, C. (2024). Asymmetric Adaption in Social Learning: Understanding the Dilemma of Competition and Cooperation. Behavioral Sciences, 14(8), 721. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14080721

About

How envioromental cues influence our behavior?

Environmental cues play a powerful role in shaping our behavior. These cues can guide our decisions in adaptive ways—for example, a fast-food advertisement might trigger hunger and influence our food choices. However, in some cases, such as in addiction, this influence becomes maladaptive. Drug-related cues can evoke intense cravings and even provoke relapse, despite a person’s intention to avoid substance use. In this project, we focus on investigating the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying cue-triggered decision-making, with a focus on how environmental cues can influence actions, sometimes outside of conscious control, and the role of our motor system. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial not only for advancing basic science but also for informing clinical approaches to treating addiction and other compulsive behaviors.

Using a series of experiments inspired by the Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) paradigm, this research aims to: 1) Test the hypothesis that the motor system plays a central role in cue-triggered decision-making. Through functional MRI (fMRI), we investigate whether cues can directly activate neural motor networks involved in action preparation and execution. 2) Explore physiological markers such as pupil dilation and attentional bias to assess whether they can predict individual susceptibility to Pavlovian bias. 3) Examine the persistence of cue effects over time, using a longitudinal approach to understand how environmental cues continue to shape behavior beyond immediate contexts.

Together, these studies aim to deepen our understanding of how cues in our environment trigger behaviors—sometimes helpfully, sometimes harmfully—and to shed light on the neural systems that support these processes, particularly those related to motor control.

Finotti, G., Degni, L. A., Badioli, M., Dalbagno, D., Starita, F., Bardi, L., Huang, Y., … & Garofalo, S. (2025). Cortical beta power reflects the influence of Pavlovian cues on human decision-making. Journal of Neuroscience, 45(6). https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0414-24.2024