Thursday, September 2018
Colin Camerer – “Using Visual Saliency in Game Theory”
We measure and study visual salience in two-player games, in which players both prefer to match choices of locations or one prefers match and the other mismatch (hide-and-seek). Visual salience is predicted a priori from a computational algorithm based on principles from theoretical neuroscience and previously calibrated by human free gaze data. Salience is a strong predictor of choices, which results in a matching rate of 64% in two samples. Both seekers and hiders choose salient locations more often, though seekers also choose low-salience locations. The result is a “seeker’s advantage” in which seekers win about 9% of the games, compared to a mixed-Nash benchmark of 7%. A salience-perturbed cognitive hierarchy (SCH) model is estimated from the hide-and-seek data. Those estimated parameters accurately predict the choice-salience relation in the matching games.
Find out more »Thursday, November 2018
Pietro Ortoleva, “Econographics”
Decades of research in economics and psychology has identified a large number of behavioral regularities—specific patterns of behavior present in the choices of a large fraction of decision makers, such as the endowment effect, ambiguity aversion, or altruism—that run counter to the standard rational model of economic decision-making. However, these regularities are often studied in isolation, and their theoretical or empirical relationship is rarely discussed. In this paper, we study the pattern of correlations across a large number of behavioral…
Find out more »Tom Griffiths, “Resource-rational models of decision-making”
Anybody trying to understand human decision-making faces a challenge: the two dominant perspectives on how human minds work are fundamentally at odds with one another. The classic approach of assuming that people are rational agents has the advantage of making it possible to derive generalizable models for any new circumstance, but has been shown to give a poor characterization of actual human behavior. By contrast, the “heuristics and biases” perspective that has replaced it provides explanations for the ways in…
Find out more »Thursday, December 2018
Angela Yu, “Faces: A Window into Cognition “
Face processing plays a central role in everyday life. Faces also represent a complex and rich class of stimuli that humans readily process, recognize, and make judgments on. Understanding how the brain represents and processes faces is not only important in its own right, but provides a valuable opportunity for studying how the brain selectively and efficiently implements sophisticated computational processes. In this talk, I will give an overview of our recent work modeling human face processing. We leverage sophisticated…
Find out more »Thursday, March 2019
Molly Crockett
Moral Decision-Making: Conscience, Context, and Conformity Classical models of antisocial behavior propose that violence arises out of a failure of lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) to “put the brakes” on aggressive impulses originating in subcortical regions such as the amygdala and striatum. A new, alternative model proposes that LPFC does not directly inhibit aggressive impulses, but instead flexibly modulates the value of aggressive acts via corticostriatal circuits. I will present behavioral, pharmacological and neuroimaging experiments supporting the alternative model. The findings…
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