What happens when the brain awaits a signal of uncertain arrival time, as when a sprinter waits for the starting pistol? And what happens just after the starting pistol fires? Using functional magnetic resonance imaging ...

Reward-based decision making is thought to be driven by at least two different types of decision systems: a simple stimulus–response cache-based system which embodies the common-sense notion of “habit,” for which model-free ...

In the mammalian brain, dopamine is a critical neuromodulator whose actions underlie learning, decision-making, and behavioral control. Degeneration of dopamine neurons causes Parkinson’s disease, whereas dysregulation of ...

Little is known about the specific neural mechanisms through which cognitive factors influence craving and associated brain responses, despite the initial success of cognitive therapies in treating drug addiction. In this ...

Humans assess the credibility of information gained from others on a daily basis; this ongoing assessment is especially crucial for avoiding exploitation by others. We used a repeated, two-person bargaining game and a ...

The ability to make decisions relies on brain mechanisms designed to value our environment and elicit appropriate actions based on those values. These mechanisms allow an agent to predict the value of a potential action ...

Why are you reading this abstract? In some sense, your answer will cast the exercise as valuable—but what is value? In what follows, we suggest that value is evidence or, more exactly, log Bayesian evidence. This implies ...

The management and manipulation of our own social image in the minds of others requires difficult and poorly understood computations. One computation useful in social image management is strategic deception: our ability ...

Groups of humans routinely misassign value to complex future events, especially in settings involving the exchange of resources. If properly structured, experimental markets can act as excellent probes of human group-level ...

Sanctions are used ubiquitously to enforce obedience to social norms. However, recent field studies and laboratory experiments have demonstrated that cooperation is sometimes reduced when incentives meant to promote prosocial ...