Decision making lies at the heart of human behavior. It pervades all public and private sectors of human life and is often prominently impaired in neurological and psychiatric disorders. A mechanistic understanding of how humans make decisions is thus of major importance in many different scientific disciplines, including economics, psychology, biology, sociology, and medicine. Attempts to understand human decision making have often been limited by the use of a single research method and/or concepts rooted in a single scientific discipline. The aim of the project is to achieve a more unified mechanistic understanding of human decision making, in terms of underlying neural computations, brain systems, and their modulation by specific neurotransmitters. We intend to achieve this by adopting a truly interdisciplinary approach in addressing three general research questions that are among the most pressing research themes in neuroeconomics. Each of the themes relies on at least two distinct methodological approaches and conceptual perspectives. These three themes overlap in their focus on one general question: How do neural representations and computations of values guide decision making? The three themes investigate this general question from different angles, in reply to the following questions:
(i) How is value represented neurally at the single-cell level and the population level within brain regions?
(ii) How are these value representations integrated at the systems level, i.e., what is the role of effective connectivity between value-representing components for decision making?
(iii) How domain-specific are value representations, i.e., to what extent do human other-regarding preferences depend on neural value systems routinely found to be engaged during basic non-social decision making? This question is important because other-regarding preferences are much more strongly expressed in humans than in other species.
The proposed research will address these questions in a number of integrated studies, hence unifying previously separate lines of research. We believe that an interdisciplinary approach can result in major advances in our understanding of human decision making, by combining the complementary powers of different methods to study the common neurophysiological and computational foundations for different types of decisions.
