Characterizing individual differences in value-based decision strategies

判断和决策是人类行为的核心：无论是在杂货店还是在投票站，我们做出的选择都可能对我们自己的健康和福祉以及整个社会产生重大影响。目前的公共卫生挑战，包括肥胖和成瘾，可能源于个人决策能力与个人面临的往往具有挑战性的环境之间的不匹配。

Judgment and decision-making are central to human behaviour: Whether in the grocery store or the polling station, the choices we make can have major implications for our own health and well-being, and for society as a whole. Current public health challenges, including obesity and addiction, may stem from a mismatch between individual decision-making abilities and the often challenging environments those individuals face. One way to better understand decision-making is to study how it is carried out in the human brain. The new field of decision neuroscience has identified brain regions involved in tracking and comparing the subjective value of choice options, and begun to define how these regions contribute to decision-making. However, recent work, some of it from my lab, suggests that value-based choice is not a unitary process, even when studied with very simple tasks. Individuals seem to differ, sometimes substantially, in how they solve such problems: they may focus on different attributes of each choice, they may integrate a few or many attributes, and they may compare options across one or a few attributes. While psychology and behavioral economics have probed this variability, that work does not link readily with decision neuroscience. The overarching goal of the proposed work is to fill this gap between decision psychology and decision neuroscience, by developing novel tasks and behavioral measures of the component processes of value-based decision-making within a neurobiological framework, and applying them to study individual trait and state differences in these processes. The specific aims are to: 1. Develop novel laboratory tests of value-based decision-making for different decision domains, applying eye tracking and model-based behavioural analysis. 2. Study the relationship between trait decision and personality variables and individual differences in these specific measures of decision-making. 3. Study the effects of state manipulations, such as hunger, on individual differences in decision-making. This research program will provide new tools for studying value-based decision-making, and characterize how these measures vary with trait and state characteristics of individuals. The results will inform more robust models of the neurobiology of value-based choice, link these models to existing psychological constructs such as impulsivity, and provide tools for testing these models in clinical and public health contexts.