Economic Decision Making

To understand how people make decisions, our laboratory adopts many of the practices of behavioral economics
(e.g., incentive-compatible choices, full information). This provides an important advantage for cognitive neuroscience research:
it allows us to specify the factors underlying choice, both within and across individuals, with great precision. Moreover, many
(but not all!) important real-world choices can be described using economic terms: cost-benefit tradeoffs, utility functions, risk and
ambiguity, and temporal delay. Our core goal is to use knowledge of the functional properties of the brain to develop better understanding
of economic phenomena. In essence, we seek neuroimaging data that can shape the course of future studies of decision-making behavior. We explore these and other aspects of decision making using functional magnetic resonance imaging and, in collaboration with Marty Woldorff,
scalp electrophysiology. Through a productive collaboration with Michael Chee at Duke-NUS Singapore, we have recently applied our paradigms
to sleep deprivation, which induces systematic changes in how individuals process monetary gains and losses.