Neurobiology of Choice

Research on economic decision-making seeks to understand how subjects choose between plans of action (lotteries, gambles, prospects) that have economic consequences. The key difficulty in making such decisions is that typically no plan of action available to the decision-maker guarantees a specific outcome, rather, consequences are risky or uncertain. More recently, researchers in psychology, behavioral and computational neuroscience and psychology have started to apply these theoretical principles to studying choice behavior and its neural basis in the laboratory, for instance in electrophysiological studies of animals making choices for primary reward such as juice and neuroimaging studies of humans making choices for money. Moreover, researchers across all these fields are, in parallel, studying how decisions are guided by learning and how the computations relevant to decisions and choices are represented neurally. This emerging field of theoretically grounded decision neuroscience is now known as "neuroeconomics."
With this Research Topic, we aim to solicit contributions from researchers from the fields of neurobiology, behavioral and computational neuroscience and economics which discuss the neural computations underlying decision-making and adaptive behavior.