Past Events › Cognition and Decision Seminar Series

Understanding how people choose what information to attend to is central to modeling human behavior. The study of information acquisition lies at the intersection of three disciplines: neuroscience, psychology and economics. This symposium brings together speakers from each of these areas to provide their perspectives on how attention is modeled in their fields. Dean (Economics) will focus on recent advances in the study of 'rational inattention,' which models a decision maker who allocates attention optimally given costs and benefits of…

Goal-directed human behaviors are driven by motives. Motives are, however, purely mental constructs that are not directly observable. Here, we show that the brain’s functional network architecture captures information that predicts different motives behind the same altruistic act with high accuracy. In contrast, mere activity in these regions contains no information about motives. Empathy-based altruism is primarily characterized by a positive connectivity from the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) to the anterior insula (AI), whereas reciprocity-based altruism additionally invokes strong positive…

Every-day decisions frequently require choosing among multiple alternatives. Compared to binary choice paradigms, much less is known about the computational principle of decisions with more than two options. Previous physiological and behavioral experiments have revealed puzzling properties of human/animal decisions involving more than two options, such as interactions among these options and time-dependent decision thresholds. Why the nervous system ought to have such properties and how they functionally relate to each other remains poorly understood. To address these problems, we…