Past Events › Cognition and Decision Seminar Series

Behavioural and neural evidence reveals a retrospective, model-free or habitual process that caches returns previously garnered from available choices, and a prospective, model-based or goal-directed one that putatively relies on mental simulation of the environment. There is much current interest in understanding how these faster and slower systems are integrated to take advantage of the beneficial computational properties of each. I will discuss current theoretical and experimental approaches on the resulting architecture of choice, and note some pressing concerns.

In natural settings, we make decisions based on streams of partial and noisy information. Arguably, we summarize the perceived information into a probabilistic model of the world, which we can exploit to make decisions. This talk will explore such ‘mental models’ in the context of idealized tasks that can be carried out in the laboratory and modeled quantitatively. The starting point of the talk will be a sequential inference task that probes inference in changing environments, in humans. I will…