About
From Cues to Actions: The Hidden Influence of Learned Enviromental Cues
Environmental cues play a powerful role in shaping behaviour. Through learning, seemingly neutral cues can acquire the ability to retrieve information about rewarding outcomes and influence what we do next. This influence is often adaptive—for example, cues can help us anticipate relevant outcomes and select appropriate actions—but it can also become maladaptive, as in addiction or compulsive behaviour, where reward-related cues may bias actions despite competing goals or intentions.
My PhD research investigates the cognitive and neural mechanisms of cue-guided behaviour, with a particular focus on how learned environmental cues retrieve outcome-related information and translate it into action. Using a series of experiments based on the Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) paradigm, I examine how Pavlovian cues influence both action selection—which action is favoured—and response vigour—how strongly or persistently an action is expressed.
The research addresses four complementary questions. First, using functional MRI, I investigate whether reward-predictive cues recruit action-related neural systems even when no response can yet be made, testing the role of premotor and sensorimotor networks in cue processing. Second, using eye tracking and pupillometry, I examine how cue-related information is expressed through anticipatory attention and physiological responses, and whether these signals change with instrumental learning. Third, I study the persistence and individual variability of cue effects across repeated tests over days and weeks, including the contribution of explicit contingency knowledge and working memory. Finally, I examine whether an individual’s instrumental effort history continues to shape later cue-evoked behaviour, even when the original effort requirement is no longer present.
Together, these studies aim to explain how learned cues move from representation, to retrieval, to behavioural expression, and why the same environmental information can sometimes guide behaviour adaptively and sometimes exert a persistent or disproportionate influence. By linking learning, attention, action-related neural processing, memory, and effort, this work contributes to a broader understanding of how past experience becomes embedded in present behaviour.
Huang, Y., Qu, C., Gazzola, V., Garofalo, S., Starita, F., Krebs, R., … & Bardi, L. (2026). Motor Activation in Cue-guided Behavior: Neural Evidence from Human Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer (PIT). NeuroImage, 121874. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2026.121874
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
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 power and influence, 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 Adaptation in Social Learning: Understanding the Dilemma of Competition and Cooperation. Behavioral Sciences, 14(8), 721. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs14080721
About
The Time We Share: Self, Other, and Time in Social Interaction
How do we stay aware of ourselves while entering the perspective of someone else? In everyday social life, we constantly infer others’ thoughts and feelings, maintain a sense of self, and navigate the shifting boundary between self and other. This delicate balance shapes how we think, feel, and connect, influencing not only how we understand one another but also how time may be experienced when it unfolds in the presence of others.
Using behavioral experiments and neurobiological approaches, I study how people represent their own and others’ internal states, how these representations influence one another, and how social context shapes this dynamic. This work includes research on visual perspective taking and the role of oxytocin in self–other processing, highlighting how social and neurobiological factors shape our ability to move between our own perspective and that of another person. Building on this line of research, I also examine how self–other processing influences time perception during social interaction, asking how our experience of time changes when it unfolds not alone, but with others, and across different social contexts.
This research program continues to develop, with ongoing work exploring how social interaction across different contexts shapes the temporal structure of shared experience.
Huang, Y., Qu, C., Wei, C. et al. Oxytocin-induced modulation of explicit and implicit visual perspective taking. Sci Rep 16, 9835 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-40445-2
“However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows. Whatever cannot become the object of discourse – the truly sublime, the truly horrible or the uncanny – may find human voice through which to sound into the world, but it is not exactly human. We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”
— Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times
