Date and Time
March 1, 2006
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Brian Knutson - Stanford University

Psychologists and economists have argued that people must assess expected value in order to decide on their next course of action. Recent advances in neuro-imaging make it possible to visualize anticipatory changes in activity deep in the living human brain. In this Research in Progress seminar, Brian Knutson will review functional magnetic resonance imaging research from his laboratory suggesting that a region of the subcortex (the nucleus accumbens, or NAcc) plays an important role in anticipating financial gains. He will then describe additional findings related to financial decision making, in which NAcc activation precedes risk-taking, while activaiton in a distinct brain region precedes risk-avoidance. He will conclude by discussing this work's implications for neurally constrained theories of decision making, as well as for the rational actor model.

This is a pilot project of the Center on Advancing Decision Making in Aging (CADMA), a research effort based at CHP/PCOR.