Neuroeconomics

Undergraduate catalogue cross-listing

This course explores how humans and animals make decisions, focusing on how psychological and neural mechanisms implement, or fail to implement, economic theories of choice. Good choice is subject to evolutionary selection; poor choice accompanies many neurological and psychiatric disorders. But theoretical understanding of a function is needed to manipulate and measure it experimentally. We consider choice in many sorts of tasks; e.g., in animal foraging and human competitive interactions. Two lectures, one preceptorial.