July 2016 saw the fourth instalment of the biennial Summer School on ‘Computational and Mathematical Modeling of Cognition’, and for two weeks the Italian town of Dobbiaco became the temporary home for 35 students and early career researchers from around the world. Being one of the lucky ones to get admitted to the summer school, I went to Italy equipped with data and a project in mind. Here is a summary of the trip:

The overarching goal: Learn and write as much code as you can, feel stupid at least once every 10 minutes, have a few big ‘aha’ moments that will change your thinking. The schedule: 9am to 6pm for classes, 6pm to falling asleep on your laptop for project time. Repeat daily for 2 weeks, Sunday off (more on that later). The tasks to be accomplished by all students: At the start of the summer school, we all participated in a poster session and gave a three minute elevator pitch to communicate what topics and problems we usually work on, and also to present the mini-project each of us wanted to complete during the summer school. Each of us was assigned a supervisor, whose role it was to guide and help us with our project. On the last day, each of us gave a talk detailing our project, progress and future steps. But the main task really was to be active, to ask questions and to make sure you’re aboard the cognitive modelling bus (it’s fast). The structure: A great mix of concept-driven lectures, methodological seminars, and hands-on programming (aka play time). Most exercises involved reading, writing or modifying R code. That the summer school was heavy on R came with many advantages, such as learning about people’s favourite code snippets, witnessing a sparring match between apply functions in one corner and loops in the other, and asking yourself why you had never worked with the source command before (a must). On the down side, having R become your constant companion also resulted in unanticipated, rather undesired side effects: dreaming about being trapped inside a function and not getting out of the curly bracket … less fun than you might think. The instructors: A bunch of super smart, friendly, patient and helpful individuals with big names and great ideas (in no particular order: Stephan Lewandowsky, Simon Farrell, Jörg Rieskamp, Klaus Oberauer, Amy Criss, Casimir Ludwig, Gordon Brown, Bob French, Joachim Vandekerckhove, Christopher Donkin). The keynote speaker: Richard Shiffrin! Non-academic activities: Some of us decided to spend the Sunday (our one day off), hiking in the Dolomites and around the Tre Cime di Lavaredo. Unbeknownst to many, the route entailed a 15km, 7-hour hike up and down the mountainside, resulting in many burnt scalps, faces and sore legs. The verdict: An absolutely brilliant experience, a must for everyone interested in extending their methods toolbox and going beyond black box paradigms and performance measures. Never mind the sore legs and peeling skin, the hike was one of my personal highlights, with breath-taking views and pictures to boot. Lesson learnt: No source code? No clue? No Wi-Fi? No hiking boots or sun cream? Keep calm and find alternatives!

A big thank you to all the instructors and Casimir Ludwig, my supervisor for the summer school project, for an enlightening, interesting, hands-on, and in parts hilarious two weeks that have definitely opened new research avenues for all of us attendees.

Vom 08.06.2016 bis 11.06.2016 fand der diesjährige, neunte “JDMx Meeting for Early-Career Researchers” bei uns an der Fakultät statt.
Die JDMx Meetings bieten eine Plattform für NachwuchwissenschaftlerInnen um die eigene Forschung im Kreise von KollegInnen in vergleichbaren Phasen ihrer wissenschaftlichen Karriere vorzustellen, Ideen auszutauschen, und sich zu vernetzen.

Wir sind sehr froh, dass wir insgesamt 40 TeilnehmerInnen begrüssen durften! Die Teilnehmenden haben ihre Forschung aus den Bereichen der Psychologie, Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Neurowissenschaften, und Jurisprudenz vorgestellt, was zu lebendigen und qualitativ hochwertigen interdisziplinären Diskussionen führte.
Die drei Keynotes von Jörg Rieskamp, Gordon D.A. Brown, und Eldad Yechiam zu den Themen kognitive Modellierung in der Entscheidungsforschung, Fundamente von Präferenzentscheidungen, sowie der spezielle Rolle von Verlusten bei Entscheidungen waren die Highlights des wissenschaftlichen Programms und wir möchten uns an dieser Stelle erneut bei den Rednern bedanken!
Dirk U. Wulff, Stefan M. Herzog, und Nathaniel Phillips haben in ihren jeweiligen Workshops den Teilnehmenden praktische Fähigkeiten zu Modellkomplexität, Modellvergleich, und wissenschaftlicher Kommunikation zur Verfügung gestellt.

Weitere Informationen zum diesjährigen Meeting sind auf der Seite der JDMx 2016 zu finden.

Das 10. Jubiläum des JDMx Meetings findet 2017 an dem Ort wo alles angefangen hat statt: Am Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung von Gemeinschaftsgütern in Bonn, Deutschland.

Das Organisationskomitee 2016 bestand aus folgenden Doktorierenden:
Rebecca Albrecht, Janine Hoffart, Sebastian Olschewski, Oliver Schürmann (Economic Psychology)
Victoria Siegrist (Cognitive and Decision Sciences/ Universitätsspital)
Laura Fontanesi, Mikhail S. Spektor (Economic Psychology/ Decision Neuroscience)

From May 9 to May 11, the Workshop on Sequential Sampling Models of Decision Making, organized by Jared Hotaling, Sebastian Gluth, Jörg Rieskamp, and Jerome Busemeyer (Indiana University), was held at the Seminarhotel Seeblick in Emmetten. An impressive list of international experts on the topic (including Richard Shiffrin, Roger Ratcliff, Scott Brown, Michael Frank, Rafal Bogacz, Marius Usher, Paul Cisek and many more) were invited and gave talks at the workshop. The presentations were accompanied by some stimulating and intensive discussions about current and future challenges for sequential sampling modeling. About 15 PhD students and post docs from the SWE centers and other universities joined the meeting and presented their work during the poster session. The nice hotel with its impressive view over Lake Lucerne and the adventurous cable car trip to the mountain restaurant Niederbauen also contributed to making this a very successful and enjoyable workshop.

Wie bereits im Beitrag vom 05. August 2015 angekündigt, sind wir höchst erfreut, das “JDMx 2016 Meeting for Early-Career Researchers” vom 08.06.2016 bis zum 11.06.2016 in Basel veranstalten zu dürfen.

Die Meetings bieten eine Plattform für NachwuchwissenschaftlerInnen um die eigene Forschung im Kreise von KollegInnen in vergleichbaren Phasen ihrer wissenschaftlichen Karriere vorzustellen, Ideen auszutauschen, und sich zu vernetzen.

Weitere Informationen sind auf der Seite der JDMx 2016 zu finden.

Offizielle Ankündigung:

Dear colleagues,

We are happy to announce the JDMx 2016 meeting for early-career researchers taking place from June 8th until June 11th in Basel, Switzerland. It is an annual event organized and run by PhD students for other early-career researchers. JDMx meetings offer a platform for PhD students and early postdocs active in the judgment and decision making community to present their work, exchange ideas, and network with other colleagues in similar stages of their career.
This year’s meeting takes place in the beautiful city of Basel in Switzerland. Apart from participants’ contributions, there will be keynotes, workshops, cultural and social events.
Abstract submissions are open. We especially welcome applications from the fields of psychology, economics, cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and others concerned with the human judgment and decision making.

Date: 08/06/2016 – 11/06/2016
Location: Basel, Switzerland
Abstract submission deadline: 08/04/2016
Notification of acceptance: 15/04/2016
Participation fee: None
Language: English

Abstract submission form and all further information can be found at:

https://psycho.unibas.ch/datensaetze/abteilungen/economic-psychology/eigene-seiten-rechts/jdmx-2016/

For further questions, please contact us at decision-workshop@gmx.de

Best regards,
PhD students of the Economic Psychology group at the University of Basel

The Bernoulli-Workshop 2016 will take place on October 7th.

Future information will follow closer to the date.

We have the pleasure to announce that the 7^th Bernoulli Workshop in Economics and Psychology will take place

Friday, December 4^th, 2015

9:30-17:00, Basler Papiermühle, St. Alban-Tal 37

The workshop aims to cross disciplinary boundaries and bring together researchers from Economics and Psychology to discuss current research that is of interdisciplinary interest.

The call for presentations is open until Oct. 23^rd, 2015, and available at

http://tinyurl.com/7bernoulliworkshop

The organizers

Georg Nöldeke, Alois Stutzer, Faculty of Business and Economics

Rainer Greifeneder, Rui Mata, Jörg Rieskamp, Faculty of Psychology

The 2015 summer school at the Donders Institute at Radboud University in Nijmegen (Netherlands), running from 10th to 14th August, was the first summer school I had been to, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. The signature red Radboud University hoodie we received on the first day was an added bonus!

What prompted me to attend this particular summer school? My work at the Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences focuses primarily on trying to understand risk taking, specifically how the brain deals with tasks that require people to decide whether to take a risk or not, and also whether there are structural differences between individuals which are associated with more or less risk taking. When we are looking at the relationship between brain function or structure and risk taking, rather than simply looking at the relationship with performance-based scores, it might be more informative to try to relate individual differences in cognitive processes evoked by a task with neural variation. Why? Since the brain carries out many different computations before an action (decision) is motivated, if we can understand the latent processes elicited by a task we might be one step closer to understanding ‚how the brain does it’.

The main aim of the summer school was to give students and early career researchers the necessary knowledge, awareness and tools to do exactly that: formulate ideas about how individuals process a given task or stimulus, specify a model that captures the hypothesised computations through model parameters, and finally check how well the model accounts for observed outcomes (e.g. decisions). The model parameters in turn can be fed into analyses of neuroimaging data, for example identifying structural and/or function correlates of these very same parameters.

In the mornings, lectures and seminars by high profile researchers (e.g. Klaas Enno Stephan, Alan Sanfey, Jeffrey Schall, Hanneke den Ouden, Daeyeol Lee, Bahador Bahrami, to name but a few … ) provided the necessary background, awareness and scope for application, which we could then put into practice during afternoon workshops in the computer lab. The entire week was very well organised and will hopefully lead to some interesting research directions in the future. I heard some highly inspiring talks, met other PhD students from around the world, got to present our work in poster form and discussed our work with other researchers working on similar questions.

If you are interested in these issues, I would highly recommend that you immerse yourself in the world of social, cognitive, affective and perceptual neuroscience and attend a summer school, such as the one at the Donders Institute.

Vom 09.08.2015 bis 15.08.2015 fand die “International Summer School 2015 on ‘Theories and Methods in Judgment and Decision Making Research'” der DFG Forschungsgruppe “Contextualized Decision Making” im Tagungszentrum Rummelsberg statt.

Die 44 TeilnehmerInnen und 13 WissenschaftlerInnen von vier Kontinenten machten dem Namen “International Summer School” alle Ehre. Über 5 Tage wurde ein vielfältiges inhaltliches Programm geboten.

Die Vorträge der WissenschaftlerInnen, die sich hauptsächlich mit sog. Sequential Sampling Modellen befassten, spiegelten den aktuellen Forschungsstand und -trend im Bereich der Entscheidungsforschung wider. In den Workshops lernten die TeilnehmerInnen interaktiv Werkzeuge zur kognitiven Modellierung kennen, und bei den Postersitzungen bot sich die Möglichkeit, die eigene Forschung einem breiten Publikum von etablierten und NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen aus aller Welt zu präsentieren.

Neben dem inhaltlichen Programm gab es reichlich Möglichkeiten sich mit den WissenschaftlerInnen im kleineren Rahmen auszutauschen und bei den sozialen und abendlichen Aktivitäten Kontakt zu den anderen TeilnehmerInnen zu knüpfen.

Insgesamt war es eine sehr intensive Woche, in der viel Wissen und viele Fertigkeiten vermittelt wurden, von denen die TeilnehmerInnen im Laufe ihrer Forscherkarrieren sicherlich profitieren werden. In dem Sinne hoffen wir, dass die Summer School keine einmalige Veranstaltung bleibt sondern noch vielen NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen die Möglichkeit bieten wird, diese Erfahrung zu machen!

Vielen Dank an die Organisatoren Arndt Bröder, Edgar Erdfelder, Florence Ettlin, Florian Kutzner, und Rüdiger Pohl.
Weitere Informationen zur Summer School

The new semester is about to start and the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Doctoral Program has 5 very interesting workshops lined up for the next months. Please contact Mirella Walker if you would like to get more information about any of them.

Understanding one’ Self and Social Worlds: The Role of Emotion, Intuition, and Reason 25.09.2015

Clayton Critcher, University of California, Berkeley

Reinforcement Learning in Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology 15.10.2015

Elliot Ludvig, University of Warwick

Sequential Sampling Models in Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology 22.-23.10.2015

Timothy Pleskac, Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Structural Equation Modeling in R in Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology 12.-13.11.2015

Paolo Ghisletta, University of Geneva

A cognitive approach to lie detection 19.-20.11.2015

Aldert Vrij, University of Portsmouth

Vom 29.07.2015 bis 31.07.2015 fand der diesjährige, nunmehr achte “Judgment and Decision Making Workshop for Early Career Researchers” an dem Georg-Elias-Müller Institut für Psychologie in Göttingen statt.
Der Workshop wurde diesmal von Dorothee Mischkowski, Angela Dorrough, und Rima-Maria Rahal für andere NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen organisiert und bietet eine Plattform um die eigene Forschung vorzustellen, Ideen auszutauschen, und sich zu vernetzen.
Neben den Vorträgen der TeilnehmerInnen hat das Organisationsteam WissenschaftlerInnen gewinnen können, die nicht nur in den jeweiligen Workshops aktuelle Themen und Techniken behandelt haben, sondern auch für dedizierte Austauschsitzungen zur Verfügung standen.
Alles in Allem war das ein sehr gelungener Workshop und wir freuen uns, den neunten JDM Workshop im Sommer 2016 in Basel veranstalten zu dürfen!

Weitere Informationen zum diesjährigen Workshop

Janina Hoffmann, Bettina von Helversen, Klaus Oberauer, Thorsten Pachur, and Jörg Rieskamp organized and hosted an SNF-funded workshop this past weekend: “Workshop on Memory Processes in Judgment and Decision Making: Toward an Integrative Perspective.”

The workshop consisted of a series of talks by experts in these fields as well as discussions and small group meetings. The goal was to reach some consensus about current knowledge as well as identify promising future approaches to understanding the relation between memory and decision making. The meeting was productive but also fun and we hope to see more of these in the future!

Here is a description of the event by the organizers: “Decision making and memory are both central and strongly intertwined cognitive functions. The goal of this workshop is to link models and theories of decision making more closely to current findings and formal approaches in memory research. By bringing together researchers who have worked on the interface between the two fields from different perspectives, we hope to gain new insights into how memory and decision making processes can inform each other and be combined within a formal, integrative framework.”

Participants: Sudeep Bhatia, Gordon Brown, Arndt Bröder, Emina Canic, Marta Castela, Chris Donkin, Hannah Fechner, Klaus Fiedler, Laura Fontanesi, Bettina von Helversen, Thomas Hills, Janine Hoffart, Janina Hoffmann, Peter Juslin, Michael Kalish, David Kellen, Patrick Khader, Steve Lewandowsky, Markus Lindskog,Brad Love, Doug Markant, Rui Mata, Ben Newell, Klaus Oberquer, Sebastian Olschewski, Thorsten Pachur, Paula Parpart, Jörg Rieskamp, Lael Schooler, Henrik Singmann, Michael Spektor, Neil Stewart, Sebastian Bobadilla Suarez, Dries Trippas, Dirk Wulff.

We had our first Annual Doctoral Conference, Jan 23 2015, at the Merian-Gärten. It was great to see all the doctoral students from the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Ph.D. Program present their research.