Calendar of events

Host: Dr Elliot Ludvig

Title: "Errors" of Human Decision Making: A Perspective from Multiscale Computations

Abstract: What is the unique nature of human decision making? Importance of this question is growing given increasing uses of behavioral and decision science in applied scenes. In recent scientific studies, there are reports of deviations or anomalies to normative frameworks. We frequently and humorously illustrate these “errors” of human decision making as the signs of stupidities. In this talk, however, I would like to explain these ”errors” of human decision making from the perspectives of multiscale computations in the human brains. The observed phenomena in my studies include history-dependent biases in perceptual decision making and long-term predictive decisions in the experimental paradigms of foraging decisions, which mimic the situations of foraging behavior of animals in the wild. These experimental observations share the patterns of behavior whose effective time range goes beyond “a trial”. By integrating these findings with relevant literature, I would like to propose that computations involved in the human decision making proceed in multiple scales of time and space. This perspective would shed a new light on the nature of human intelligence (and stupidity).

Bio: Rei Akaishi obtained his PhD from Graduate School of Medicine, the University of Tokyo. He did his post-doctoral jobs in University of Oxford, Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Medical Science, University of Rochester, Center for Information and Neural Networks and conducted research projects on decision making of humans and animals. He is currently a Unit Leader in RIKEN Center for Brain Science.