Please join us in Moore BO3 on Friday, September 29, 2017, at 4 p.m., as Camillo Padoa Schioppa, Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Washington University School of Medicine, presents “A Neural Circuit for Economic Decisions.”

Abstract:  Economic choice behavior entails the computation and comparison of subjective values. A central contribution of neuroeconomics has been to show that subjective values are represented explicitly at the neuronal level. This result at hand, the field has increasingly focused on the difficult question of where in the brain and how exactly values are compared to make a decision. I will describe a series of results suggesting that good-based decisions emerge from a neural circuit within the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). The main lines of evidence are (1) the fact OFC lesions specifically disrupt goal-directed behavior, (2) the fact that during economic choice different groups of cells in OFC encode the input and the output of the decision process, (3) the fact that activity fluctuations in each of these groups of neurons correlate with choice variability, and (4) the fact that these groups of cells are computationally sufficient to generate decisions. In addition, we recently developed a theoretical framework to assess optimal coding of offer values. We thus demonstrated that value coding in the OFC is functionally rigid (linear tuning) but parametrically plastic (range adaptation with optimal gain).

A reception will follow outside of Moore 202.