Rate My Professor Alison Harris

Alison Harris, Ph.D., serves as the Cook-Ostby Associate Professor of Psychology and George R. Roberts Fellow in the Department of Psychological Science at Claremont McKenna College. She obtained her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2005, where her research focused on face perception, and her S.B. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000. Following her graduate studies, Dr. Harris held postdoctoral researcher positions at the University of Pennsylvania from October 2005 to August 2009 and at the California Institute of Technology from September 2009 to June 2012, including a Visiting Associate role from July 2012 onward. She joined Claremont McKenna College as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology in July 2012.

A cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Harris directs the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory at Claremont McKenna College, utilizing event-related potentials to investigate the neural dynamics of perception, cognition, and decision-making. Her research specializations include decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics, addressing topics such as self-control mechanisms, effort-based cost-benefit valuation, dietary self-control, social status influences on fairness, and multi-attribute choice processes. Key publications encompass 'Temporal dynamics of decision making: A synthesis of computational and neurophysiological approaches' (2021, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science); 'Accounting for taste: A multi-attribute neurocomputational model explains the neural dynamics of choices for self and others' (2018, Journal of Neuroscience); 'Temporal dynamics of sensorimotor networks in effort-based cost-benefit valuation: Early emergence and late net value integration' (2016, Journal of Neuroscience); 'Temporally dissociable mechanisms of self-control: Early attentional filtering versus late value modulation' (2013, Journal of Neuroscience); and 'Dynamic construction of stimulus values in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex' (2011, PLoS ONE). Among her honors are the National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship (2000-2003) and the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship (1999).