Title: Human representation of uncertainty in decision making

Speaker: Laurence T. Maloney(New York University)

Time: September 29 2016 (Thu) 10:00-11:30

Venue: R1113, Wangkezhen Building, PKU

We make decisions continually throughout the day.  Some of these decisions are the sort familiar to economists, framed in terms of profit and loss, but others involve selection of actions. Do we cross the street now or wait a bit? In past work my colleagues and I have shown that – to a first approximation -- such motor decisions can be modeled by the  same framework of value and probability  used in modeling economic decisions. However, as we explored further we found that human representation of probability consistently deviated from the objective probabilities of outcomes. I will review work concerning how human decision makers represent and use probability and frequency information in carrying out simple motor and visual tasks and then describe more recent experiments that lead us to the unexpected conclusion that – at least in some decision tasks– representation of probability is discrete, not continuous.

Host: Hang Zhang