Title: Oscillatory mechanisms underlying decision-making under uncertainty

Speaker: Ming Hsu (University of California, Berkeley )

Introduction:

Dr. Ming Hsu is an Assistant Professor at Haas School of Business, and  Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley. Professor Hsu is part of the first generation of researchers who bridged the gap between neuroscience and economics to study the brain basis of decision-making and formally initiated the interdisciplinary field of decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics. His research involves combining economic models of choice behavior with a variety of neuroscientific experiment modalities, such as neuroimaging, psychophysiology, electrocorticography, and etc. Results from these works have been reported in top neuroscience and general scientific journals, includingScience, Nature Neuroscience, PNAS, Current Biology, and etc. Being considered as one of the most recognized young scholars in the field of decision neuroscience, he has received prestigious academic awards such as Kavli Fellow and the Early Career Award from the Society for Neuroeconomics.

Time: December 15 2015 (Tue) 13:00-15:00

Venue: 1113, Wangkezhen Building, Peking University

Host: Dr. Lusha Zhu

Abstract:

Despite tremendous recent progress in elucidating core neurocomputational components that underlie economic decision-making, we still know little about the mechanisms that coordinate the various signals within and across various brain regions.  Here I will discuss results from recent electrocorticography (ECoG) studies suggesting a fundamental role of neural oscillations in governing intra- and inter-regional communication during decision-making.  Specifically, we recorded local field potentials in the prefrontal cortex of in neurosurgical patients who were engaged in a gambling task. ECoG signals reflect the coordinated activity of ensembles of hundreds of thousands of neurons, and are uniquely poised to reveal fast, circuit-level computations in the human brain. We found that different aspects of the gambling game generated event-related changes in oscillatory activity across multiple areas and frequency bands. Furthermore, oscillatory interactions between lateral and orbital prefrontal regions support cognitive processes underlying decision-making under uncertainty.  Together, these data highlight the importance of network dynamics in characterizing neural basis of economic decision-making.