We have Sebastian Horn from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development visiting us this week and giving a talk in our Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology colloquium (Thursday, April 28, 2016, 13:00, title and abstract follow).

Rapid and Frugal Decisions from Memory: A Lifespan Overview

In many situations, decision making involves some form of remembering because relevant information (e.g., about values and possible outcomes) is not perceptually given in the environment but must be quickly retrieved. Mnemonic constraints are thus an important source of age-related differences in decision making. While there is a wealth of literature on age differences in specific memory processes (or components) on the one side and in judgment and decision performance on the other, only little research has linked these largely independent research traditions so far. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of two streams of my work on memory-dependent decisions in school-age children, adolescents, younger, and older adults: First, this will include a discussion of age differences in rapid gain-loss valuation of objects and of the contributions of associative, strategic, and numerical abilities in these tasks. Second, I sketch research on the strategic reliance on recognition for inference and point to possible sources of developmental differences in strategy use. Taken together (and in line with an ecological perspective), the findings suggest that age effects in various memory-based decisions follow the distinct lifespan trajectories of the required abilities and, ultimately, on the interplay with the task environment.

Dr. Wouter van den Bos, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, will be visiting us this week and giving a talk in the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Colloquium (Thursday 21 April, 13:00-14:00; title and abstract follow).

Impulsive decision-making in adolescence: A neuro-cognitive account

Adolescence is a developmental period associated with an increase in impulsive behavior. Although this is crucial for the acquisition of skills needed for adult life, it also leads to maladaptive outcomes. Despite the clear importance of understanding impulsive behavior, the underlying psychological and neural mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this talk I will present the results of a series of studies that focus on computational and neural correlates of inter-temporal decisions. More specifically, we zoom in on the role of the cortico-striatal loops and pubertal hormones. Finally, I will discuss some more preliminary work on the role affect and time perception. Taken together, the results suggest that developmental changes in decision-making are the results of several interacting cognitive and affective processes, each with its unique developmental trajectory.

We have Prof. Dr. Dominique Muller, Université Grenoble Alpes, France, visiting us this week and giving a talk at the Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology colloquium (talk title and abstract follows).

Approach/avoidance tendencies: A grounded cognition framework

How do people react toward a stimulus? An important and adaptive component of all possible reactions is whether they instantiate approach or avoidance. Often, however, taking too long to think about it could be dangerous or inefficient. To be effective, most approach and avoidance decisions need to be implemented very quickly. Instead of deliberating about whether to approach or avoid a given stimulus, one may simply retrieve the approach/avoidance tendencies triggered in past encounters with this kind of stimulus. In this talk we will adopt a grounded cognition to infer how these past encounters should be stored in memory. We will then illustrate how previous work fits with our framework and present experiments conducted in our lab that enable to test new hypotheses derived from this framework.

Mark the date: in the afternoon of May 3rd (Tuesday), 2016, we will have our annual events in which students can get an overview of the master program in Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology (SED), at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Basel. This event will be followed by talks (and an Apero) in which alumni will describe their work experiences as SED graduates. We hope to see many of you there!