Planning, motivation and decision making during reward-guided choice and learning

old_uid19061
titlePlanning, motivation and decision making during reward-guided choice and learning
start_date2021/05/03
schedule11h-12h
onlineno
detailsS’inscrire auprès de nathalie.blancho@cea.fr
summaryDeciding between apples and oranges has been an age-old question not just for hungry shoppers but within the field of decision-making research. However, very rarely have researchers considered the possibility to reject either and move on to the next shelf. I have previously argued that such a sequential decision making framework is not just essential for understanding foraging in animals in the wild, but also ecological, real life, behaviour in humans [1,2]. While it is intuitive that real life decision strategies require temporally extended coherent behaviours [2] and rely on prospection, maintained motivation and sequential adaptation, those cognitive and neural processes remain poorly understand. In the first part of my talk I will present our recent cognitive model for sequential search decisions, its underlying neural dynamics [3]. In the second part I will talk about how more complex sequential behaviours could be supported by learning. Specifically, I will discuss multiple representations of changing reward environments in the anterior cingulate cortex [4,5] and how the changeability of the reward environment can affect how rare reward experiences are processed in orbitofrontal cortex.
responsiblesBlancho