Federal Grant Award Summary

Yale University received a $121,842 Project Grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) under the Mental Health Research Grants program (CFDA 93.242), effective April 1, 2026, through March 31, 2028. The award funds research investigating the neural mechanisms underlying altruistic decision-making, with focus on how the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and striatum evaluate costs and rewards when individuals make choices that benefit others at personal cost. The research employs an ethologically relevant animal model system and integrates naturalistic behavioral paradigms, wireless high-density neural recordings, and computational modeling to identify the neural computations supporting prosocial decision-making in both cooperative and competitive social contexts.

The project is structured around three primary research aims: (1) examining how physical costs influence altruistic behaviors in cooperative tasks and how the mPFC integrates self and partner effort levels; (2) exploring altruistic decisions in competitive contexts by manipulating reward inequity to understand how the mPFC supports selfish versus altruistic strategies; and (3) investigating mPFC-striatal circuit mechanisms using advanced neural recording techniques and biologically constrained multi-area recurrent neural network models to generate testable hypotheses and enable causal circuit manipulation. Research outcomes are expected to advance understanding of prosocial decision-making with potential implications for addressing psychiatric disorders involving social deficits, including autism spectrum disorder.