Capstone: Decision and Social Neuroscience: Understanding Decision Making Under Risk, Cooperation and The Bystander Effect

Recent advances fusing neuroscience, microeconomics, social psychology and game theory tools have been successful in explaining behavioral and neural dynamics underlying decision making and social interactions. I will present evidence supporting (i) the value of parameterizing the decision process and (ii) using simplified games simulating real-world exchanges. Firstly, I will set the basis by unfolding behavioral and neuronal parameters predicting individual decision-making in risky environments. Subsequently, the presentation will expand to the social domain and explore how computational approaches can explain learning mechanisms of competitive and cooperative social actions. By combining basic reinforcement learning models, functional magnetic resonance imaging and social psychology paradigms we were able to identify learning signals mirroring cooperative or competitive social orientations. From a clinical perspective, the apparent scarcity of both diagnostic and modeling tools to adequately describe and quantify the dynamics underlying deviant social behavior can be bridged by the adoption of well-controlled, experimental methods combined with neuroscience and computational modeling. Finally, implications and future directions for cross-disciplinary cognitive research will be discussed.