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• 1 2016-11-04T06:49:01-07:00 How Does Decision-Making Work? 19 plain 2016-12-12T08:08:59-08:00 Every day, whether we realize it or not, we are forced to make countless decisions. These decisions can often be simplistic, like the everlasting college student dilemma to decide between studying or watching just one more episode of a favorite Netflix show, or they can be extremely difficult and complex, like deciding what career path to follow. We make regularly make conscious and subconscious decisions that when summed together determine the path of our lives. As you know, this project aims to understand the functioning of moral decision making in individuals with ASD. But first we must try to understand,  what exactly is decision making? What processes happen in our brain when we are make decisions in different situations and what factors affect how we make these decisions? Is decision making actually within our conscious control? Or does our brain contain pre-determined pathways that compel us to act in certain ways? Below, I have compiled a discussion on the major theories of decision making, along with further questions and hypotheses, to better understand this emerging field in neuroscience before delving into my specific inquiry. 

  What is Decision Making?

  In the most basic sense, decision-making is the act of choosing between two or more courses of action. Decisions can be intuitive or reasoned, but most often result from a combination of both. 
  
  (1) Intuitive decisions - commonly referred to as "gut feeling" or "impulsive" decisions. Results from a combination of past experience and personal values. These type of decisions often emphasize emotions and feelings. 
  
  (2) Reasoned decisions - uses fact, figures, and other hard data to complete a decisions. Focuses less on the emotional aspects of the decision at hand, approaches it in a more structured and logical sense. 
  
  

  What Brain Regions are Involved in Decision Making?

  
  
  

  
  What factors influence our decision making?

  • Emotion - Tell you if a situation is optimal or not aligned with your goal, thus influencing future decisions
  • Past Experience - past decisions influence the decisions people make in the future. When something positive results from a decision, people are more likely to decide in a similar way, given a similar situation. On the other hand, people tend to avoid repeating past mistakes (Juliusson, Karlsson, and Garling 2005)
  • Cognitive Biases - thinking patterns based on observations and generalizations that may lead to memory errors, inaccurate judgments, and faulty logic. Causes people to give more validity to expected observations/previous knowledge, and dismiss more uncertain observations. Some examples include:
    •  belief bias - over dependence on prior knowledge in arriving at decisions
    • hindsight bias - people tend to readily explain an event as inevitable, once it has happened
    • omission bias -  propensity to omit information perceived as risky
    • confirmation bias-  people observe what they expect in observations 
  • Belief in personal relevance - When people believe what they decide matters, they are more likely to make a decision (Acevedo and Krueger 2004). 
  • Individual Differences 
    • Age
    • Socioeconomic status
    • Education Level 
    • Cognitive Abilities
  • Amount of investment - individuals invest larger amounts of time, money, and effort into a decision to which they feel committed

  Is decision making within our conscious control?

  Eric Kandel is a leading neuroscientist that has proposed several theories for decision making in our brains. In this video he discusses experiments that revealed that by observing another person's brain activity, one can predict what someone is going to do before he is aware that he has made the decision to do it. This finding caused caused philosophers of mind to ask: If the choice is determined in the brain unconsciously before we decide to act, where is free will? Is there free will?
  
  https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10894
  
  "What was happening was the option that was useless, in the middle, was useless in the sense that nobody wanted it. But it wasn't useless in the sense that it helped people figure out what they wanted.In fact, relative to the option in the middle, which was get only the print for 125, the print and web for 125 looked like a fantastic deal. And as a consequence, people chose it. The general idea here, by the way, is that we actually don't know our preferences that well. And because we don't know our preferences that well, we're susceptible to all of these influences from the external forces: the defaults, the particular options that are presented to us, and so on."- Dan Ariely