Subject: PARC Forum JULY 12, 2007 : "Neural Representation of Expected Value", Dr. Brian Knutson

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2007 15:49:36 PDT

PARC Forum

Thursday, July 12, 2007, 4:00-5:00 PM

George E. Pake Auditorium

Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)

This forum is OPEN to the public.

TITLE: Neural representation of expected value

SPEAKER: Dr. Brian Knutson, Assistant Professor of Psychology and
Neuroscience, Stanford University 

ABSTRACT:

Psychologists and economists have argued that people must assess
expected value in order to decide on their next course of action. Recent
advances in neuroimaging make it possible to visualize anticipatory
changes in activity deep in the living human brain. I will review
original functional magnetic resonance imaging research suggesting that
a region of the subcortex (the nucleus accumbens, or NAcc) plays an
important role in anticipation of financial gains. I will then describe
additional findings related to financial decision making, in which NAcc
activation precedes risk-taking, while activation in a distinct brain
region precedes risk-avoidance. I will conclude by discussing
implications of this research for neurally constrained theories of
decision making and the rational actor model.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Brian Knutson is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience
at Stanford University. His research focuses on the neural basis of
emotional experience and expression. He investigates this topic with a
number of methods including self-report, measurement of nonverbal
behavior, comparative ethology, psychopharmacology, and functional brain
imaging. 

His long-term goal is to understand the neurochemical and
neuroanatomical mechanisms responsible for emotional experience and to
explore the implications of these findings for the assessment and
treatment of clinical disorders of affect and addiction, as well as
economic behavior.

Knutson has received Young Investigator Awards from the National
Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Association
for Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychiatric Association,
and the New York Academy of Science. He received BA degrees in
experimental psychology and comparative religion from Trinity
University, a PhD in experimental psychology from Stanford, and has
conducted postdoctoral research in affective neuroscience at UC-San
Francisco and at the National Institutes of Health.

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Upcoming Forums:

(Please note that there will be no Forum on July 5th)

July 19, 2007

"Putting the Turing into Manufacturing: Recent Developments in the
Science of Automation"

Ken Goldberg, Professor of IEOR, EECS, and Director of the Center for
New Media, University of California, Berkeley 

July 26, 2007

"Sustainable product design"

Terry Swack, Founder and CEO, Clean Culture

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