Nils KOLLING (University of oxford, Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity) will give a talk on Zoom on May 3rd.

https://www.psych.ox.ac.uk/team/nils-kolling

Short abstract:

Deciding 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.