Another great conference took place in Miami at the end of September, hosted by the Society of Neuroeconomics. The program featured some excellent talks covering not only core concepts within neuroeconomics (e.g. valuation, risk, time preference) but also applications to areas such as consumer behaviour, social preferences, well-being, finance and aging, memory and learning. Dr. Sebastian Gluth from the Department of Economic Psychology was one of the presenters, and he discussed his research on the influence of the attraction effect on intertemporal choice and valuation.

I presented a poster about our work at the Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences, specifically data coming from the Basel-Berlin Risk Study. The main research questions revolve around the nature and measurement of risk taking, and the study involved testing more than 1000 individuals over several hours in the lab. In addition, 130 of the lab participants were invited back for an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) session, during which they played a couple of games inside the scanner whilst we measured their brain activation and structure. Across these two sessions, participants completed multiple self-report instruments as well as computerized tasks, giving us a rich data set to look into risk taking. The data I presented at the conference spanned a network of (inter)correlations for self-report and behavioural measures of risk taking, conjunction maps for brain activation in the two task paradigms and a 3D anatomical grid onto which we mapped associations between brain structure and risk taking measures. The conference and especially the poster session were fantastic outlets for presenting our work to the world (in particular the neuroeconomics community) and for getting feedback. Also, it was very interesting to meet other PhD students as well as more senior researchers and to see what topics other labs are working on. Next year’s meeting will take place in Berlin, Germany, which should be equally exciting.