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，我们所做的选择都会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这些人面临的往往具有挑战性的环境之间的不匹配。 更好地理解决策的一种方法是研究它是如何在人脑中进行的。决策神经科学的新领域已经确定了参与跟踪和比较选择选项的主观价值的大脑区域，并开始定义这些区域如何有助于决策。然而，最近的工作，其中一些来自我的实验室，表明基于价值的选择不是一个单一的过程，即使在非常简单的任务中也是如此。每个人在解决这些问题的方式上似乎存在差异，有时甚至是实质性的差异：他们可能会关注每一个选择的不同属性，他们可能会整合几个或多个属性，他们可能会比较一个或几个属性的选项。 虽然心理学和行为经济学已经探索了这种可变性，但这项工作并不容易与决策神经科学联系起来。拟议的工作的总体目标是填补决策心理学和决策神经科学之间的这一差距，通过开发新的任务和行为措施的组件过程中的价值为基础的决策在神经生物学框架内，并应用它们来研究个人的特质和状态差异，在这些过程中。具体目标是： 1.为不同的决策领域开发新的基于价值的决策实验室测试，应用眼动追踪和基于模型的行为分析。 2.研究特质决策与人格变量之间的关系以及这些具体决策措施的个体差异。 3.研究国家操纵的影响，如饥饿，对决策的个体差异。 该研究计划将为研究基于价值的决策提供新的工具，并描述这些措施如何随个人的特质和状态特征而变化。研究结果将为基于价值的选择的神经生物学模型提供更强大的信息，将这些模型与现有的心理结构（如冲动）联系起来，并为在临床和公共卫生背景下测试这些模型提供工具。

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.