Antonio Rangel and his team are trying to understand how the brain assigns value to various options when faced with a choice, identifying the regions of the brain that encode those decisions. They are also investigating how the workings of the decision-making system change in more complex forms of choice, such as decisions involving self-control or altruism.
The project, Using Triangulation to Characterize the Neurocomputational Basis of Simple Choice, aims to advance our understanding of the neurocomputational basis of very simple decisions, such as choosing between an apple and an orange, by comparing how rodents, monkeys and humans make these types of choices. The research is predicated on the idea that studying the same decision problem in different species will provide critical insights into how humans make simple and more complex decisions.
