Biographies & Abstracts

BIOGRAPHIES AND ABSTRACTS

Elizabeth M. BRANNON

• Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience - Duke University

Biography : Dr. Elizabeth M. Brannon graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her B.A. in Physical Anthropology from Columbia where she worked with Dr. Marina Cords. In 2000, she completed a Ph.D. in Psychology in the laboratory of Dr. Herb Terrace. She has been at Duke in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience since the year 2000 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2008 and Full Professor in 2012. She is currently at the Director of Graduate Studies for The Cognitive Neuroscience Admitting Program. She maintains a secondary appointment in The Evolutionary Anthropology Department. She has received numerous academic awards and honors including the Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, a Merck Scholar Award, and a James McDonnell Scholar award. She is an Associate editor of Developmental Science. Dr. Brannon's research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and The National Science development and comparative psychology and maintains two laboratories focused on quantitative cognition in nonhuman primates and human infants.

Title : Foundations for sympbolic mathematics: development and evolution of our primitive number sense

Abstract : I will present a body of behavioral and neural data that demonstrates that there are strong developmental and evolutionary precursors to adul mathematical cognition that can be undercovered by studying human infants and nonhuman primates. I will take the position that the approximate number system serves as a developmental foundation for the uniquely human numerical faculty.Implications for education will be explored by describing a) a longitudinal study exploring the relationship between infants's number sense and later developing mathematical cognition in childhood and b) a set of training studies exploring the link between primitive number sense and symbolic mathematics.

 Stefano PALMINTERI

• Post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives - DEC/ENS

Biography : Stefano Palminteri received a Master degree in Pharmaceutical Biotechnology from the University of Bologna, Italy, in 2006 and a Master degree in Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience from the University Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, in 2007. He joined the Motivation Brain & Behavior Team at the Institut du Cerveau et de la Moëlle in Paris and received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience supervised by Mathias Pessiglione, in 2012. Since then, he has been in the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as a post-doctoral fellow where he is working on learning and decision-making with Etienne Koechlin and Giorgio Coricelli. At the same time, he has also been teaching Neuroeconomics at Paris 1 University. Thanks to a Marie Curie fellowship, he has joined in 2013 the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience to work with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore on the development of learning and decision-making during adolescence.

Title : Contextual control of option value during learning

Abstract : Context-dependency of option values has been studied in respect to adaptive coding and range-adaptation. Here we show with a multiple tasks design, that value contextualization is also deployed at the service of punishment avoidance. This adaptive function is traded against the acquisition of potentially suboptimal preferences. Both effects (adaptive and maladaptive) were well accounted by a novel learning model, which bridges antagonist 'value-first'-type and 'comparison-first'-type approaches to decision making. The specific computational construct, context value, was represented in a lateral (dorsal and polar) prefrontal system, whereas a medial system (ventral and dorsal) appeared to be limited to decision value encoding. Neural data also show that contextualization of option value promotes neural efficiency, limiting the need for a punishment opponent learning system. This last observation conciliates wealth of pervious inconsistent findings, advocating similitude or difference between the reward and punishment learning neural system.

Michael PLATT

• Director of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences - Duke University
• Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience - Duke University
  
• Professor of Neurobiology - Duke University

Biography : Michael Platt is director  of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and Professor of Neurobiology, Evolutionary Anthropology, and Psychology & Neuroscience at Duke University. He received his B.A. from Yale and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and did a post-doctoral fellowship at New York University. He studies how we make decisions, using a combination of neural recordings, pharmacology, brain imaging, genetics and computation, in humans, monkeys, and other animals. His work has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Klingenstein Foundation, the McDonnell Foundation, the EJLB Foundation, Autism Speaks, the Broad Foundation, the Klarman Foundation, and the Department of Defense, among others. He is a winner of the Ruth and A. Morris Willimas Faculty Research Prize in the Duke University School of Medicine, and was an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow. He has given the Sage Lecture at UC Santa Barbara and has received the Astor Visiting Professor award at Oxford University. Michael has authored over 68 peer-reviewed papers and over 32 review and opinion papers. Michael is an editor of major textbooks in neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, and he is a former president of the Society for Neuroeconomics. Michael's work has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, and National Geographic, as well as on ABC's Good Morning America, NPR, CBC, BBC, and MTV. Michael values teaching, and was a recipient of the Master Clinician/Teacher Award from the Duke University School of Medicine. He has also served as a consultant on several films, including The Fountain (Warner Bros, Darren Aronofsky, director) and as a scientific advisor to NOVA.

Title : Decision Making : The Ethological Turn

Abstract : Neuroeconomics applies decision-theory models derived from economics and psychology to inform neurobiological studies of choice behavior. This approach has revealed neural signatures of concepts like value, risk, ambiguity, and temporal discounting, which are known to influence decision-making. Such observations have led to the development of models positing a single, unified decision process of distinct outcomes like food, money, or social praise. In parallel, recent neuroethological studies of decision-making have focused on natural behaviors like foraging, mate choice, and strategic social interactions. These fundamental decisions strongly impact fitness and thus are likely to have played a key evolutionary role in shaping the neural circuits that mediate decision-amking. This neuroethological approach has revealed a suite of computational motifs that may form the ancestral scaffold for decision-making in a wide array of organisms. We argue that the existence of deep homologies in the neural circuits mediating choice behavior has potentially powerful implications for understanding human decision-making in both health and disease.

HILKE PLASSMANN

• Assistant Professor at INSEAD
• Principal Investigator at the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives - DEC/ENS

Biography : Hilke Plassmann (INSEAD, Ecole Normale Supérieure) is an Assistant Professor in INSEAD's Marketing Area, where she has built a Decision Neuroscience Group. Since 2009, she is an affiliated faculty at the Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory INSERM U960 of the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and the Ecole des Neurosciences de Paris Ile-de-France. She was also on the faculty of the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University (non-professorial faculty) and has been visiting faculty at The Wharton School and the Stern School of Business. Hilke's primary research area is judgment and decision-making in the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and economics. In recent and current research projects, she investigates the neural basos of different decision-making related value signals and ways to self-regulate these signals. Hilke is also interested in the influence of pricing, branding and health information on consumer decision-making. Her work has implications for both, management and public policy.

Title : How expectancies effect outcome valuation : brain mediators and moderators

Abstract : Drawing on studies of placebo effects on pain perception and several own studies of how marketing-based expectations can alter consumption enjoyment or outcome valuation; I establish a model of brain mediators using functional brain imaging and brain moderators using structural brain imaging (i.e VBM analysis).