Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Research FocusNeural computations of decision utility
Section snippets
Traditional models of decision-making
We think of a decision ‘occurring’ when a person (or any organism) has an unfulfilled need and takes an action to achieve the goal of satisfying that need. A good decision is one that chooses the best available course of action in the face of uncertainty about what consequences will occur after the action is taken. For many years, psychologists and economists (and before them philosophers and mathematicians) have attempted to model decision-making processes theoretically. The focus of
Representation of utility in the brain
The recent study by Sugrue et al. [1] makes a substantial contribution to this burgeoning field. Their method placed two rhesus monkeys in an experimental setting akin to a natural environment, requiring the animals to ‘forage’ through this environment to seek out rewards (drops of juice). The monkeys were presented with two possible colored targets, red or green; on each trial, they were free to choose either of these targets. The choice was made via an eye saccade to the favored target. The
Deciding where to go now
Other researchers are also now seeking to examine this type of choice behavior in animals [12], and there has in recent years been a vast increase in the number of functional neuroimaging studies concerned with understanding the brain basis of decision-making in humans, examining people in a wide variety of decision-making contexts – as they make decisions about which gambles to choose [13], as they play economic games 14, 15, 16, and even as they choose which member of the opposite sex they
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