In many societal problems, individuals exhibit a conflict between keeping resources (e.g., money, time or attention) to themselves or sharing them with another individual or group. The reasons motivating decisions in favor of others welfare can thereby vary from purely altruistic to completely strategic. Be it the stranger making an effort returning a lost valet to its rightful owner or a co-worker pitching in her fair share in a joint project. Actions like that create an environment that makes living together a pleasant experience. Hence, understanding how decisions determining the welfare of oneself and others are made is important for facilitating this behavior by building institutions that maximize the rate of cooperation in a society. To shed new light on such decision making processes I will present recent evidence from a set of process tracing experiments utilizing eye-tracking and economic games. Experiments will focus on the role of social preferences in the choice construction process and will identify mechanisms (i.e., search and processing depth, information weighting, and ignorance) through which they guide choice behavior. I will in particular focus on the differences and commonalitiesbetween strategic and altruistic decisions. Specifically, investigating to which extent people direct attention towards certain components of the decision situation in a context-dependent manner.

Unlike even the most sophisticated current forms of artificial intelligence, developing biological organisms must build their neural hardware from scratch. Furthermore they must start to evade predators and find food before this construction process is complete. I will discuss an interdisciplinary program of mathematical and experimental work which addresses some of the computational principles underlying neural development. This includes (i) how growing axons navigate to their targets by detecting and responding to molecular cues in their environment, (ii) the formation of maps in the visual cortex and how these are influenced by visual experience, and (iii) how patterns of neural activity in the zebrafish brain develop to facilitate precisely targeted hunting behaviour. Together this work contributes to our understanding of both normal neural development and the etiology of neurodevelopmental disorders.