Event Details:
The neurophysiology underlying precommitment to avoid sunk costs - evidence from mice, rats, and humans
Mice, rats, and humans are all "suboptimal" on foraging tasks - they tend to linger too long once they've committed to a decision. Using a foraging task with behavioral similarities across species, we will take on the neurophysiological evidence that all three species are sensitive to sunk costs, in part because changing one’s mind after a choice leads to regret. We will see neurophysiological evidence that precommitment arises from an interaction of multiple decision-making systems, including planning systems capable of imagining future outcomes and avoiding those that produce regret.
A. David Redish
University of Minnesota
A. David Redish is a Distinguished McKnight University Professor and the J. B. Johnston Land Grant Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He earned his BA degree from Johns Hopkins in computer science and creative writing and his PhD from Carnegie Mellon in computer science. He has been on the faculty of the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota since 2000. His work spans questions of decision-making from the theoretical to the experimental, and he is now working on clinical translations of that work. He is the author of over a hundred papers and four books, including Beyond the Cognitive Map: From place cells to episodic memory (MIT Press 1999) and The Mind within the Brain: How we make decisions and how those decisions go wrong (Oxford Univ Press 2013) and a co-edited book Computational Psychiatry: New Perspectives on Mental Illness with Joshua Gordon which appeared in 2016. His most recent book is Changing How We Choose: The new science of morality (MIT Press).
About the Wu Tsai Neuro MBCT Seminar Series
The Stanford Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology Seminars (MBCT) explores ways in which computational and technical approaches are being used to advance the frontiers of neuroscience. It features speakers from other institutions, Stanford faculty and senior training program trainees.
The MBCT Seminar Series is only offered in person.