Following decision making dynamics in the brain

We make decisions all the time: should we get butter milk or normal milk? Should we go by bike or by car? Accumulator models of decision making model this decision process as a process that slowly drifts towards decision thresholds (“butter milk” or “normal milk”), where the quality of the information is reflected in the drift rate of this process, and the location of the thresholds indicates how careful a person is in making his decisions.

We use the dynamics predicted by the models to find neural correlates of decision processes. Brain waves at the slow 4–9 Hz theta frequency seem to correlate best with the model-predicted decision dynamics. Conversely, potentials arising from motor cortex tell us about how the decision threshold is crossed and reveal the lingering echos of the accumulation process. In this talk assistant professor Marieke van Vugt describes how detailed quantitative models of decision making can help us to understand the brain, and the brain can also tell us about the applicability of these models.

About the speaker

Marieke van Vugt obtained her Bachelor of Science degree at Utrecht University College, majoring in science (physics, mathematics and neuroscience). She then went on to do a PhD with Michael Kahana at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. There she studied how similarity affects memory, and how that manifests in brain waves (oscillations). To be able to do that, she introduced a model-based EEG approach to the laboratory. After that she continued to do a postdoc with Jonathan Cohen at Princeton University, where she studied the neural correlates of drift diffusion models of decision making in EEG and fMRI. Since December 2010 she’s been an assistant professor at the Department of Artificial Intelligence of the University of Groningen. Currently she studies how people make decisions based on remembered information.