The neural and cognitive representation of money in decision-making

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The overall goal of my research is to understand the psychological and neural mechanisms that underpin biases in decision-making, giving rise to suboptimal choices. I study this in the specific context of gambling behavior. Most research on human decision-making, including research on gambling, uses money to represent positive and negative outcomes (i.e. wins and losses) and incentivize participants. Yet from a psychological perspective, money is an unusual commodity. It has no inherent value; rather, the value of money is learned in childhood, based upon its capacity to be exchanged for desirable goods. There is no equivalent of money in non-human species. Moreover, research from consumer psychology indicates that we are more willing to spend money in certain forms, for example on a credit card compared to physical cash. These peculiarities of money are relevant to both behavioural neuroscience (e.g. validity of translational models of decision-making in non-human species) and public policy (e.g. should casino patrons be allowed to gamble using a credit card?). The long-term objective of this proposal is to characterize the psychological role of money in risky decision-making.