Recently added articles from Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience:
Introduction
Dec 01, 2008; ... In October 2006, a group of young PhD students and postdocs from all over Europe followed the call of the German Volkswagen foundation to convene in Berlin and discuss their common research interests. The Volkswagen initiative, called the "European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and ...
Understanding risk: A guide for the perplexed
Dec 01, 2008; ... Over the course of the past decade, neurobiologists have become increasingly interested in concepts and models imported from economics. Terms such as "risk," "risk aversion," and "utility" have become commonplace in the neuroscientific literature as single-unit physiologists and human cognitive ...
Dual or unitary system? Two alternative models of decision making
Dec 01, 2008; ... In recent years, a lively debate in neuroeconomics has focused on what appears to be a fundamental question: Is the brain a unitary or a dual system? We are still far from a consensus view. The accumulating evidence supports both sides of the debate. A reason for the difficulty in reaching a ...
Neurobiological studies of risk assessment: A comparison of expected utility and mean-variance approaches
Dec 01, 2008; ... When modeling valuation under uncertainty, economists generally prefer expected utility because it has an axiomatic foundation, meaning that the resulting choices will satisfy a number of rationality requirements. In expected utility theory, values are computed by multiplying probabilities of ...
Cortico-limbic-striatal circuits subserving different forms of cost-benefit decision making
Dec 01, 2008; ... Research on the neural basis that underlies decision making in humans has revealed that these processes are mediated by distributed neural networks that incorporate different regions of the frontal lobes, the amygdala, the ventral striatum, and the dopamine system. In the present article, we ...
The role of moral utility in decision making: An interdisciplinary framework
Dec 01, 2008; ... What decisions should we make? Moral values, rules, and virtues provide standards for morally acceptable decisions, without prescribing how we should reach them. However, moral theories do assume that we are, at least in principle, capable of making the right decisions. Consequently, an ...
Conceptual representations in goal-directed decision making
Dec 01, 2008; ... Emerging evidence suggests that the long-established distinction between habit-based and goal-directed decision-making mechanisms can also be sustained in humans. Although the habit-based system has been extensively studied in humans, the goal-directed system is less well characterized. This ...
Weakness of will, akrasia, and the neuropsychiatry of decision making: An interdisciplinary perspective
Dec 01, 2008; ... This article focuses on both daily forms of weakness of will as discussed in the philosophical debate (usually referred to as akrasia) and psychopathological phenomena as impairments of decision making. We argue that both descriptions of dysfunctional decision making can be organized within a ...
Decision theory, reinforcement learning, and the brain
Dec 01, 2008; ... Decision making is a core competence for animals and humans acting and surviving in environments they only partially comprehend, gaining rewards and punishments for their troubles. Decision-theoretic concepts permeate experiments and computational models in ethology, psychology, and ...
Decision ecology: Foraging and the ecology of animal decision making
Dec 01, 2008; ... In this article, I review the approach taken by behavioral ecologists to the study of animal foraging behavior and explore connections with general analyses of decision making. I use the example of patch exploitation decisions in this article in order to develop several key points about the ...
Making decisions with a continuous mind
Dec 01, 2008; ... Neuroeconomics is a rapidly expanding field at the interfaces of the human sciences. The interdisciplinary nature of this field results in several challenges when attempts are made to solve puzzling questions in human decision making, such as why and how people discount future gains. We argue ...
The contribution of distinct subregions of the ventromedial frontal cortex to emotion, social behavior, and decision making
Dec 01, 2008; ... Damage to the ventromedial frontal cortex (VMFC) in humans is associated with deficits in decision making. Decision making, however, often happens while people are interacting with others, where it is important to take the social consequences of a course of action into account. It is well known ...
Cells, circuits, and choices: Social influences on perceptual decision making
Dec 01, 2008; ... Making decisions is an integral part of everyday life. Social psychologists have demonstrated in many studies that humans' decisions are frequently and strongly influenced by the opinions of others-even in simple perceptual decisions, where, for example, participants have to judge what an image ...
Time and decision making in humans
Dec 01, 2008; ... Decision making requires evaluating alternatives that differ on a number of attributes. During this evaluation process, selection of options depends on the duration of the options, the duration of the expected delay for realizing the options, and the time available to reach a decision. This ...
Anxiety and cognitive efficiency: Differential modulation of transient and sustained neural activity during a working memory task
Sep 01, 2008; ... According to the processing-efficiency hypothesis (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007), anxious individuals are thought to require greater activation of brain systems supporting cognitive control (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; DLPFC) in order to maintain equivalent performance ...
Effects of anxiety on task switching: Evidence from the mixed antisaccade task
Sep 01, 2008; ... According to the attentional control theory of anxiety (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007), anxiety impairs performance on cognitive tasks that involve the shifting function of working memory. This hypothesis was tested using a mixed antisaccade paradigm, in which participants ...
Intact implicit and reduced explicit memory for negative self-related information in repressive coping
Sep 01, 2008; ... Voluntary emotional memory control has recently been shown to involve prerrontal down-regulation of medial temporal lobe activity during memory retrieval. However, little is known about instances of uninstructed, naturally occurring forgetting. In the present study, we examined whether memory ...
Recognition of facial expressions is influenced by emotional scene gist
Sep 01, 2008; ... Recognition of facial expressions has traditionally been investigated by presenting facial expressions without any context information. However, we rarely encounter an isolated facial expression; usually, we perceive a person's facial reaction as part of the surrounding context. In the present ...
Examinations of identity invariance in facial expression adaptation
Sep 01, 2008; ... Faces provide a wealth of information essential to social interaction, including both static features, such as identity, and dynamic features, such as emotional state. Classic models of face perception propose separate neural-processing routes for identity and facial expression (Bruce & ...
Differential activation patterns of occipital and prefrontal cortices during motion processing: Evidence from normal and schizophrenic brains
Sep 01, 2008; ... Visual motion perception is normally mediated by neural processing in the posterior cortex. Focal damage to the middle temporal area (MT), a posterior extrastriate region, induces motion perception impairment. It is unclear, however, how more broadly distributed cortical dysfunction affects this ...