Learned valuation during forage decision-making in cuttlefish

Dissociating valuation and saliency signals during decision-making.

There is a growing consensus that the brain computes value and saliency-like signals at the time of decision-making. Value signals are essential for making choices. Saliency signals are related to motivation, attention, and arousal. Unfortunately, an unequivocal characterization of the areas involved in these 2 distinct sets of processes is made difficult by the fact that, in most experiments, ...

Learned Human-in-the-Loop Decision Making

Decision Making Using Learned Causal Structures

Decision making and causal reasoning are clearly relevant for one another, but have often been studied in relative isolation. In this paper, we report the results of two experiments that investigated whether people can make appropriate decisions using causal beliefs learned from sequences of cases. We found that people behave close-to-optimally for various causal and payoff structures, even tho...

Issues in ecosystem valuation: improving information for decision making

In Spring 1991, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency convened an expert group of ecologists, economists and other social scientists for the purpose of advancing the state of the art of ecosystem valuation methods. This Ecosystem Valuation Forum was organized as a dialogue because it has been clear from the outset that agreement even on the meaning of the term "ecosystem valuation" could not...

Intrinsic Valuation of Information in Decision Making under Uncertainty

In a dynamic world, an accurate model of the environment is vital for survival, and agents ought regularly to seek out new information with which to update their world models. This aspect of behaviour is not captured well by classical theories of decision making, and the cognitive mechanisms of information seeking are poorly understood. In particular, it is not known whether information is valu...