What Decides Our Decisions?

Our social interactions require adapting to an ever-changing social context, constantly switching between cooperative and competitive decisions. Dr Andrea Pisauro, researcher in Cognitive Neuroimaging at the University of Glasgow, studies how our brains choose between cooperation and competition. He recorded brain activity of participants playing an economic game in which two players had to forage for food in a virtual space, either cooperating or competing with the other player. Andrea will discuss what happens in your brain when switching from a competitive to a cooperative scenario.

"Is it safe to trust a stranger based only on his appearance? Our everyday life involves frequent situations where we must make choices based on incomplete information. One of the greatest challenges in science is to understand how our brains manage to make these choices in the social landscape. Dr Emanuele De Luca, lecturer in psychology at the University of Glasgow, combines a range of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience and economics, to investigate the neural mechanisms involved in predicting and responding to social and non-social forms of uncertainty."