Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Essays on the Neural Basis of Consumer Choice

DRMS中的博士论文研究：关于消费者选择的神经基础的论文人们经常面临在同样有吸引力但原因不同的选项之间的选择。人们如何在这些看似相同的选择之间做出选择，是经济学、心理学、金融学和营销学等多个领域颇感兴趣的话题。一系列研究表明，背景因素“例如增加了第三个不具吸引力的选项，可能会使在看似相同的选项之间做出选择变得更容易。”另一项研究表明，在最初的任务中运用自我控制会影响人们在后续任务中做出选择的方式。虽然这些背景因素中的一些因素的影响是可以预测的，但这些决定的潜在神经机制还没有被很好地理解。这项拟议的研究将使用功能磁共振成像(FMRI)来研究决策背后的神经机制。我们将操纵背景因素来检验现有的几种决策模型中的哪一种解释了潜在的选择过程。特别是，我们将考察不相关选择的增加对决策神经机制的影响，以及不相关选择的存在如何与先前的自我调节耗尽任务在影响选择方面相互作用。这些发现可以用来提高对人类决策的理解，在广泛的情况下，决策者被证明做出了次优的决定。

Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Essays on the Neural Basis of Consumer Choice People are often confronted with a choice between options that are equally attractive, but for different reasons. How people choose between such seemingly equivalent options is a topic of considerable interest in a number of fields including Economics, Psychology, Finance and Marketing. One stream of research has shown that contextual factors" such as the addition of a third, unattractive option may make the choice between seemingly equivalent options easier. Another stream of research suggests that exertion of self-control on an initial task impacts how people choose between options on a subsequent task. While the effects of some of these contextual factors can be predicted, the underlying neural mechanism for these decisions is not well understood. The proposed research will investigate the neural mechanisms underlying decision making using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We will manipulate contextual factors to examine which of several extant models of decision making explain the process underlying choice. In particular, we will examine the impact of the addition of irrelevant alternatives on the neural mechanisms of decision making, and how the presence of the irrelevant alternative interacts with prior self-regulatory depleting tasks in influencing choice. The findings could be used to improve understanding of human decision making in a wide range of situations where decision makers have been shown to make suboptimal decisions.