Over the last decade there has been much interest in how people make decisions, fueled in large part by data from novel neuroscience techniques. However, these advancements in data collection have not yet been matched by advancements in our understanding of the cognitive processes that guide decision-making. This project seeks to bridge that gap by generating mathematical models of the underlying choice processes that can then be tested using a variety of data, such as eye movements during the evaluation of the options, hand movements during the execution of the choice, and the overall time that it takes to make a decision. Unlike prior research in decision-making, this project aims to develop models that can be applied and tested across different types of choices. This will yield unique insights into the principles that guide all choices, as well as potentially identify what makes some types of choices unique. The research will also investigate how individual differences in attention, preference, and learning strategies, as well as environmental factors such as time pressure, influence the choice process. This work will advance our basic understanding of the mind and help us to quantitatively predict the effects of new institutions, policies, and behavioral interventions. The educational and outreach projects will expose people of all ages to the exciting work being done in decision science and will ensure continuing public interest and pursuit of careers in STEM, through research internships, summer institutes, workshops, and courses aimed at increasing student interest in this work, as well as televised programs featuring prominent decision neuroscientists, and public lectures from the PI, intended to reach a broader segment of the public.
This project is an integrated research, education, and outreach program focused on dynamical modeling of the interactions between attention and choice in human decision making. The program features an innovative computational approach to studying the features that are common (and unique) to different types of decisions, creating links between previously disjoint domains, and shedding new light onto the general principles underlying human behavior. The overall objectives of this project are to study the attention-guided comparison process in single and multi-dimensional choice problems and differences in this process between individuals; to determine what processes guide learning and how they differ across individuals; to investigate how these processes change in social settings and whether people learn from others? choice processes; and to develop and test models of how people assign value to objects in their environment.