Jacqueline Gottlieb, Mark Dean, Eric Johnson – Symposium on Information Selection

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 information. Johnson (a psychologist in the Business School) will discuss how information acquisition can be used to reveal cognitive processes in choice. Gottlieb (Neuroscience) will discuss the relation between studies of attention and decision in neuroscience, and the dual roles of uncertainty and reward in motivating information sampling.