Risk

David Spiegelhalter discusses how to reason about chance, incomplete knowledge, risk and luck. Drawing on his book The Art of Uncertainty, the conversation moves between everyday surprises and consequential historical decisions. It examines why uncertainty can be personal and why disagreement can help people reason more carefully.

…to decision variables, including risk and expected value. To address these questions, we recorded activity of amygdala neurons while monkeys viewed sequentially presented stimuli that provided separate information about the probability, magnitu

…and the effects of task factors like risk, novelty, prior knowledge, arousal and attention are under-explored. We designed a new computer-based experiment where participants could firstly explore a list of different author’s paintings or quotes and then select items with the same authorship. Most participants showed improvement in performance, yet factors, including previous progress, risk and novelty conditions, pupil diameter and heart rate, p

Maladaptive decision-making under risk is a feature of various neuropsychiatric disorders, yet the underlying neural circuits remain largely unexplored. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a main region for action-reward updating and flexible behaviors, is likely to play in this process. Our study aimed to investigate the role of the OFC in decision-making under risk. We developed a task requiring rats to choose between a safe option leading to a modest gain and a risky option which may earn a larger, but not guaranteed reward. Different probabilities were associated with the risky option so tha

A key insight from the foraging literature is the importance of assessing the overall environmental quality — via global reward rate or similar measures, which capture the opportunity cost of time and can guide behavioral allocation toward relatively richer options. Meanwhile, the majority of research in decision neuroscience and computational psychiatry has focused instead on how choices are guided by much more local, event-locked evaluations: of individual situations, actions, or outcomes. I review a combination of research and theoretical speculation from my lab and others that emphasizes t

Risk occupies a central role in both the theory and practice of decision-making. Although it is deeply implicated in many conditions involving dysfunctional behavior and thought, modern theoretical approaches to understanding and mitigating risk in either one-shot or sequential settings, which are derived largely from finance and economics, have yet to permeate fully the fields of neural reinforcement learning and computational psychiatry. I will discuss the use of dynamic and static versions of one prominent approach, namely conditional value-at-risk, to examine both the nature of risk avoida