Decision Neuroscience

Our group is interested in investigating the psychological and neural processes underlying how we make decisions and choices.

Decision Neuroscience offers a novel approach to the study of both individual and interactive decision-making by combining the methods of behavioral experiments, functional neuroimaging, and formal economic models. Use of this methodology has the potential to advance our knowledge of existing theoretical accounts of how people make decisions and judgments by informing and constraining these models based on the underlying neurobiology.

Examining sophisticated high-level behavior at a neural level, such as deciding on how much risk to take with a financial investment, choosing on a strategy when playing a competitive game with an opponent, or estimating how much you can trust another person to cooperate can provide important clues as to the fundamental mechanisms by which decision-making operates.

A further goal of our group is to use the knowledge gleaned from these studies to inform public policy debates, for example in understanding how expectations play a role in financial and health-care decisions.

Links

• Neural Decision Science Laboratory