Behavioral Social Neuroscience Seminar

This lecture describes recent advances in our understanding of the neural mechanisms responsible for some forms of decision-making. The study of decision-making opens a window on the neural basis of many other higher cognitive capacities which also use information in a contingent fashion and in a flexible time frame free from the immediacy of sensory events or the need to control a body in real time. I will describe neural recordings from the parietal cortex of nonhuman primates that are trained to make difficult perceptual decisions. The neural responses provide insight into how decisions are made: how accuracy and speed are traded against one another, how the brain reasons from probabilistic cues (as in predicting the weather), how prior probability affects the decision process, and how the brain assigns confidence degree of belief that a decision is correct.