Symposium
Decisions and Emotions
April 21/22 (2009), De Poort, Groesbeek, the Netherlands
Appropriate decision-making is a primary survival skill. Sensory information, goals and the judgment of reward through actions are key elements of decision-making. Throughout the animal kingdom decisions that affect survival are made continuously e.g. for mate selection, food acquisition and navigation. Human behaviour, despite its exquisite complexity, is rooted through its evolutionary origins in the mechanisms of animal decision-making.
Recently a merging of approaches of different disciplines has vitalized research in the field of decision-making, bringing together techniques from cognitive neuroscience, economics and psychology. An important insight from economics was introduced into neuroscience as a result; certain neurons within the circuitry that make animals act, appear to compute "expected utility", the product of the subjective value of the outcome of an act and the probability that that outcome will happen. The brain selects between different actions according to expected utility. This concept is tremendously successful in bridging the gap between neural activity in (frontal) cortex and decisions of a single actor in a world filled with uncertain events.
It is well known that motivational-emotional states affect the value attributed to outcomes of acts, i.e. expected utility, and therefore influences decision-making, and social ranking of individuals. However, the neural basis of motivational-emotional states and their contribution to the neural computation of "expected utility" is still poorly understood, as is the contribution of motivational-emotional states in game-theoretical accounts of social behaviour. A significant advance in our understanding would therefore require a clarification of the effect of motivational-emotional states on expected utility: Does this state affect the valuation component of expected utility or also the estimation of the probability of the outcome? And which are the neural mechanisms underlying this interaction?
In this symposium a group of international speakers from the fields of neuroscience, neuroeconomics and behavioural sciences will present and discuss their current research on the topic of human/animal decision-making and the effect of emotional states.
The organizing committee:- Prof. Dr. Richard van Wezel (chair, UU, Functional Neurobiology)
- Prof. Dr. Leon Kenemans (UU, Experimental Psychology)
- Prof. Dr. Bert van den Berg (UU, Functional Neurobiology)
- Dr. Jack van Honk (UU, Experimental Psychology)
- Dr. Dennis Schutter (UU, Experimental Psychology)