Cognition and Decision Seminar Series

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 bra...

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 assumi...

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 pre...

Though neuroscientists have developed an exquisitely detailed understanding of the role of different brain regions in perceiving the external world, our understanding of the relevant functional module...

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...

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 ...

Value is a central concept in economic theory and in neuroeconomics. Nonetheless, we have only recently begun to understand how the brain evaluates options and compares values to make beneficial choic...

We conduct two experiments to test the predictions of a recently proposed theory of context-dependent choice under risk called salience theory. The theory predicts that a decision maker’s attention ...

The Churchland lab aims to define the neural circuits that allow animals to integrate evidence across time and from different sensory inputs (sight, hearing, etc) in order to guide decisions. To achie...

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 o...

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 c...

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, p...

I will present the results of two related experimental studies (work in collaboration with Luca Polonio) in which we used eye-tracking to measure the dynamic patterns of visual information acquisition...

The capacity for cognitive control, one of the defining characteristics of human cognition, is also remarkably limited. Typically, people cannot engage in more than a few — and sometimes only a sing...

For the last century, economists have assumed that agents have ‘deep’ time preferences — in other words, agents value pleasures and pains in t years more than pleasures and pains in ...

Rewards induce learning (positive reinforcement), approach behavior, economic decisions and positive emotions (pleasure, desire). We investigate basic neuronal reward signals during learning and decis...

Basic psychophysics tells us that decisions are rarely perfect: even with identical stimuli choice accuracy fluctuates and errors are often made. Metacognition allows appraisal of this uncertainty and...

It is commonly argued that the brain aggregates information in a hierarchical fashion. I will discuss how hierarchical aggregation of information gives rise to predictable imperfections in inference, ...

Neural gain, thought to be modulated by the locus coeruleus-norepinephrine system, can be thought of as a contrast control mechanism — when gain is high, the contrast between weakly and strongly...

Decisions often reveal something about of one’s preferences, to others but also to oneself. After the fact, this can be a source of pleasure or pain; before the fact, anticipation of these feelings ...

We learn from experience to make better decisions, often by adjusting our expectations to match past outcomes. In a dynamic world, this adjustment process must itself be adaptive, because changes can ...

Intelligence profoundly affects social behavior. Evidence will be provided on how intelligence affects the rate of cooperation in repeated games, social cohesion in school environments, attitude to ri...