Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for March, 2019

Gökhan Aydogan

On Thursday 21 March, the guest speaker in the SWE Colloquium is Gökhan Aydogan from the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich.

Neural substrates of self-control: Comparing evidence from small-task-fMRI experiments and brain structure in 12,675 individuals

We face a set of choices every day – what to eat, whether to exercise, how much to spend – for which self-control is required to satisfy long-term goals. As with other executive functions, self-control is generally considered to be an effortful process that is subject to occasional failure. The associated neural substrates of self-control, which shape the ability to resist temptations, have drawn substantial attention from neuroscience, economics, psychology and related fields. However, the extent to which humans can facilitate self-control, and whether this ability is constrained by biological and genetic factors is still an open question. This talk compares evidence from two task-fMRI experiments with results from a large-scale study linking brain structure to genetic data in 12,675 individuals. Specifically, we show that frontal executive-control areas are (functionally) more engaged with increasing demand for self-control (N1 = 29, N2 = 21), and that anatomical differences of the same areas (N = 12,675) predict self-controlled behavior in the field. We also find initial evidence for genetic factors contributing to these anatomical differences that ultimately shape behavioral phenotypes.

Risk-Taking Symposium at the International Convention of Psychological Science 2019

Last week I was in Paris attending the 2019 International Convention of Psychological Science in Paris, for which I had organised the symposium ‘Risk Taking Across the Life Span: Integrating Biological, Cognitive and Social Perspectives’. The overarching aim of the symposium was to bring together researchers from different disciplines in order to exchange ideas and find a common road map for the study of individual differences in risk taking. Alongside talks from Iroise Dumontheil (Birkbeck, University of London) and Richard Karlsson Linnér (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), I presented some work we conducted at CDS. As you can gauge from our title slides, the three of us share an interest in biological and developmental aspects of risk taking.

I also attended other symposia on risk taking, but found the lack of awareness of measurement issues disappointing. It seems that as a discipline, we have not made much progress in bridging the gap between lab measures and real-world outcomes, not just within the context of risk-taking research but within the context of psychological research in general. This needs to change.

Apart from our own symposium, the conference featured several keynote addresses, and I was excited to learn one of them was to be given by BJ Casey. BJ Casey is an eminent Professor of Psychology at Yale University, who has spent most of her academic career researching adolescent development by focusing on the adolescent brain. I found it interesting that the title of her talk promised to illuminate adolescence both from the perspective of a period of adaptive and arrested development, yet most of the work she presented adopted primarily one measure and focused predominantly on the maladaptive rather than the adaptive aspect of adolescent decision making. Still, some impressive work across several years involving many collaborations and many more doctoral students.

Cognitive and Neural Bases of Multi-Attribute, Multi-Alternative, Value-based Decisions

Imagine you want to buy a car. First, there are only two cars available and you make your decision. You like car A more than car B. But in the last moment, the vendor presents you a third option: Car C. According to economic principles, the third option should not change your preference of car A over car B. Yet, many empirical studies have shown that people’s preferences between two options can depend on a third alternative, a phenomenon referred to as context effects. In multi-attribute, multi-alternative, value-based decisions (as in the car example) these context effects appear and are not well met by traditional static decision theories.

In this review paper, we (Jörg Rieskamp and Sebastian Gluth) joined forces with Jerome Busemeyer from Indiana University and Brandon Turner from Ohio State University to discuss the advantages and the features of sequential sampling decision-making models that are able to account for context effects in multi-attribute, multi-alternative, value-based decisions. Despite important differences, all of these models assume that the process of multi-attribute, multi-alternative decision making uses the attribute features of options as inputs, compares those attributes across options and then integrates the comparisons across time to produce an accumulated preference for each option until a threshold is reached (see the Figure).

 

 

These sequential sampling models generally make better predictions than traditional economic choice models as they account for context effects. Furthermore, sequential sampling models make it possible to predict decision time and implications for eye movements and neural activation: There is evidence from fMRI studies that the posterior parietal cortex is linked to the feature processing of input options at the beginning of the decision process. Another important brain area is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) which plays a role in the attribute comparison process. The dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex are thought to be implicated in the evidence accumulation process. However, to better understand the neural circuitry underlying multi-attribute, multi-alternative decisions, we argue that further studies that make use of EEG and its exquisite temporal resolution will be necessary.

 

Busemeyer, J. R., Gluth, S., Rieskamp, J., & Turner, B. M. (2019). Cognitive and Neural Bases of Multi-Attribute, Multi-Alternative, Value-based Decisions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(3), 251–263. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2018.12.003

“There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.” – Simone de Beauvoir

I’ll tell you something – before heading off to New York City, I wasn’t that excited. I had been to NYC before and thought that it’s too big, too loud, too crowded. But it happened that Yaacov Trope, the researcher I wanted to work with, is at New York University. I thought “Well, living in New York City for half a year is not the worst thing that can happen to you”. When the plane took off on August 22nd 2018 and I miraculously got upgraded to business class, I was joking that this would set the tone for my time there. Turns out that it actually did.

Some of the notable events of my stay (and these are just the work-related ones):

  • Finding my apartment, which was a 10 min walk away from NYU (only affordable thanks to the SNSF grant I received, and it still had roaches)
  • Presenting four times in the Trope lab and receiving incredibly valuable feedback every single time
  • Being invited to give a talk at Princeton University and catching up with the people I had worked with in 2014
  • Visiting Tom Gilovich and his lab at Cornell University (this time by bus, so that American Airlines didn’t have a chance to lose my suitcase again and make me present in leggings and sneakers)
  • Attending the SESP conference in Seattle (see also my earlier blog post) and the SPSP conference in Portland
  • Being able to attend seminars, talks, and journal clubs at the NYU Stern School of Business, which led to a research project with Adam Alter and Yaacov

I would like to thank Yaacov and his lab members, NYU, the SNSF, and my great colleagues in Basel for making this experience possible! (and for enduring numerous Skype calls with lousy sound quality …)

“New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it: Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.” – John Steinbeck


Peter Bossaerts

Guest speaker at the SWE Colloquium on Thursday, 14 March, is Peter Bossaerts, Department of Finance, University of Melbourne:

Towards biological foundations of decisions with uncertainty: A mission incomplete

We know a lot about how humans deal with one type of uncertainty, where trial-and-error (reinforcement learning) works effectively, such as in foraging, in gambling, or in repairing, tuning, and even in strategic games. Animals such as monkeys, rats or mice approach this type of uncertainty in the same way, and hence, we have a fantastic animal model, with which to study the biological foundations. The findings have generated some of the algorithms that are at the core of Artificial Intelligence (AI). But what if uncertainty is generated by computational complexity? Theoretically, one cannot deal effectively with it by means of trial-and-error. A more methodical approach is called for. And indeed, humans follow fundamentally different strategies when faced with complexity. The talk will summarize ten years of research on human attitudes towards complexity. It will show what makes a decision difficult for humans, how the theory of computation sheds light on it, and how humans are in one important respect still ahead of computers.

Jan Gläscher

On Thursday 7 March, Jan Gläscher, from the Institute for Systems Neuroscience at the University of Hamburg, visits to give a presentation as part of the SWE Colloquium.

Successful cooperation by coordination of mental models

Humans are experts in cooperation. To effectively engage with others, they have to apply Theory of Mind (ToM), that is they have to model others beliefs, desires, and intentions and predict their behavior from these mental states. In this talk I present data from a EEG hyperscanning study in which we investigated ToM processes during novel, real-time cooperative decision game. The game consists of a noisy and unstable environment. For successful cooperation participants have to model the state of the world and their partner’s belief about it and integrate both pieces of information into a coherent decision. We modeled the behavior with Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decisions Processes (I-POMDP) a computational framework that extends single agent action planning under uncertainty to the multi-agent domain by including intentional models of other agents. Using this framework, we successfully predicted interactive behavior. Critically, modeling the other partner’s belief accurately led to more coordinated actions and hence to more success in the game. Using model-based EEG and the extracted the beliefs from the I-POMDP model we investigated “belief prediction errors” in the brain and found neural signatures for own and other belief prediction errors in the lower frequency bands primarily across frontal and central sensors. In summary, our data provide evidence that participants used their ToM capacity to model the beliefs of the other partner and integrate their belief into their action planning. Updating this complex belief structure depends on a specific prediction error computed for both players. All of this suggests that successful cooperation relies on the coordination of mental models.

three identical strangers

Three identical strangers is a sobering documentary about triplets raised apart that were part of an unethical study.

The movie does a great job of portraying the drama involved in the reunion of three brothers and their relationship from their late teens (19) onwards when two of them met by chance (the third learned about the 2 brothers through a newspaper article about their reunion). Importantly, the movie details how the three brothers learned about their role as study subjects and their difficulties in finding out about the study goals and what information was collected about them across their childhood and adolescence.

The study seems to have been the product of an agreement between a psychiatrist and an adoption agency to develop a longitudinal study of twins reared apart in which the children were placed in specific types of family (e.g., different types of socio-economic background) and which the host families (and twins) were unwittingly part of. The documentary makes a lot out of the results of the study never having been published. Yet, the study seems to have involved only a few twins (numbers of ca. 8 are mentioned in the movie, the wikipedia entry mentions 13 pairs) so it is unlikely that it would represent a strong contribution to the literature. Further, and most likely, the backlash felt from the families discovering the unethical character of the study led the involved scientists to avoid further polemic by not publishing any of it.

I liked the documentary but found it unfortunate that it sketches a picture of twin studies as rather inconclusive and ends on a number of general intuitions about the importance of nurture to individuals’ personalities (along the lines of the importance of parenting). It is rather odd that a documentary that explicitly aims to get us to think about the nature-nurture debate, and focuses on “uncovering” a twin study, fails to invite experts in this field to discuss such ethical issues and give a more informed view of the science accumulated over the past decades.

In fact, from the over 2700 publications on over 14.5 million twins that have been produced, we have learned a lot about the influence of hereditary factors on many human traits, including psychological ones (Polderman et al., 2015). Contradicting some of the intuitions expressed in the documentary, there is an important role of genetics (“nature”) in both intelligence and personality (with the heritability of intelligence higher relative to intelligence, ca. .6 vs. .4 at adult ages; see below Figure 1 from Briley & Tucker-Drop, 2015).

Crucially, as can be seen in the panel on the right,  the influence of shared environment – those influences that are shared among twins, such as parenting – on personality is low, indeed, 0 (according to Briley & Tucker-Drop, 2015), with the remaining variance being explained by non-shared environment – the product of the unique physical and social experiences that result from interactions with peers, friends, and partners over the course of our lives.

Perhaps this knowledge could have better helped the twins put in perspective the role played by the study in shaping their lives.

Briley, D. A., & Tucker-Drob, E. M. (2015). Comparing the developmental genetics of cognition and personality over the life span. Journal of Personality, 85(1), 51–64. http://doi.org/10.1111/jopy.12186

Polderman, T. J. C., Benyamin, B., de Leeuw, C. A., Sullivan, P. F., van Bochoven, A., Visscher, P. M., & Posthuma, D. (2015). Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies. Nature Genetics, 47(7), 702–709. http://doi.org/10.1038/ng.3285