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…
Find out more »Thursday, September 2019
The Bayesian Sampler: Generic Bayesian Inference Causes Incoherence in Human Probability Judgments
The Cognition and Decision Seminar Series presents The Bayesian Sampler: Generic Bayesian Inference Causes Incoherence in Human Probability Judgments Dr. Adam Sanborn University of Warwick Human probability judgments are systematically biased, in apparent tension with Bayesian models of cognition. But perhaps the brain does not represent probabilities explicitly, but approximates probabilistic calculations through a process of sampling, as used in computational probabilistic models in statistics. Naïve probability estimates can be obtained by calculating the relative frequency of an event…
Find out more »Thursday, October 2019
The Strategic Brain under Risk in Games and Lotteries with FMRI
The Cognition and Decision Seminar Series presents The Strategic Brain under Risk in Games and Lotteries with FMRI Rosemarie Nagel Universitat Pompeu Fabra While the neuroeconomics of individual decision making has been extensively studied, the neuroeconomics of strategic interaction remains relatively unexplored. I will begin by introducing three classic strategic situations, the Beauty Contest, Stag Hunt, and Entry games, to illustrate the general structure of simple strategic interaction situations, and some basic principles of game theory. The predictions of…
Find out more »Tuesday, February 2020
Memory and Representativeness – Andrei Shleifer
The Cognition and Decision Seminar Series presents Memory and Representativeness Andrei Shleifer Harvard University We explore the idea that judgment by representativeness reflects the workings of episodic memory, especially interference. In a new laboratory experiment on cued recall, participants are shown two groups of images with different distributions of colors. We find that i) decreasing the frequency of a given color in one group significantly increases the recalled frequency of that color in the other group, ii) for a…
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