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Behavioral Social Neuroscience Seminar

Thursday, May 19, 2016
4:00pm to 5:00pm
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Baxter B125
Oscillatory Mechanisms Underlying Decision-Making Under Uncertainty
Ming Hsu, Assistant Professor, Haas School of Business and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley,

Abstract:

Despite tremendous recent progress in elucidating core neurocomputational components that underlie economic decision-making, we still know little about the mechanisms that coordinate the various signals within and across various brain regions.  I will discuss results from recent electrocorticography (ECoG) studies suggesting a fundamental role of neural oscillations in governing intra- and inter-regional communication during decision-making.  Specifically, we recorded local field potentials in the prefrontal cortex of in neurosurgical patients who were engaged in a gambling task. ECoG signals reflect the coordinated activity of ensembles of hundreds of thousands of neurons, and are uniquely poised to reveal fast, circuit-level computations in the human brain. We found that different aspects of the gambling game generated event-related changes in oscillatory activity across multiple areas and frequency bands. Furthermore, oscillatory interactions between lateral and orbital prefrontal regions support cognitive processes underlying decision-making under uncertainty.  Together, these data highlight the importance of network dynamics in characterizing neural basis of economic decision-making.

For more information, please contact Barbara Estrada by phone at 626-395-4083 or by email at [email protected].