"In Conversation" Series
Lecturer:
Prof. Paul Glimcher (NYU)
Title:
20-years-of-neuroeconomics
Abstract:
Cognitive and social scientists have long struggled with the irrationalities of human choice behavior; people consistently make choices that appear logically inconsistent. Classic work in psychology from the 1970s established the patterns of these irrationalities, clearly demonstrating 'what' people do with great precision. That line of research, however, has struggled to explain 'why' people make these odd choices or 'how,' mechanistically, people make these irrational choices. Work conducted in and around my laboratory over the last 25 years has linked the conceptual foundations underlying what people do with the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie these behaviors. That work has revealed a number of foundational mechanisms for the representation of value in the brain that serveas central constraints on how and why we make the decisions that we do. Building from those constraints, it now seems clear that the apparent irrationalities observed in human choice behavior are in fact near optimal responses to biophysical and thermodynamic constraints on real biological systems.
Location:
Eilat Hall, Feldman Building, Second Floor, Edmond Safra Campus.