Upcoming Events
Frederike Petzschner
12:30pm-1:50pm, Friday, September 18th, 2026
Abstract
The judgement that an action is worth performing at all rests on a belief of agency: that what one does bears some reliable relation to what one obtains. Beliefs of this kind, concerning the efficacy of one’s own agency, are neither uniform across individuals nor stable within them, and their distortions are distributed across much of the psychiatric spectrum. At one pole lies the depressive conviction that no available action will alter the course of events; at the other, the compulsive conviction that a particular action, however arbitrary its relation to the feared outcome, must nevertheless be performed lest catastrophe ensue. I argue that these apparently opposite phenomena are better understood as two expressions of a single computational problem, that of assigning credit for observed outcomes to the actions that may or may not have produced them. The first half of the talk concerns disordered gambling. We show how the illusion of control, an expectancy of personal success in excess of what the objective probabilities warrant, inflates both the magnitude of wagers and subjective estimates of winning under conditions determined by chance alone, and how the systematic misattribution of wins to skill rather than to fortune sustains compulsive play. The second half addresses credit assignment more directly. Here we examine how beliefs about action-outcome contingency give rise to repetitive behaviour in healthy participants and in obsessive-compulsive disorder, where actions are repeated despite evidence that they contribute little to the outcomes they are intended to secure.
Sevgi Yuksel
12:30pm-1:50pm, Friday, November 6th, 2026
Steve Chang
12:30pm-1:50pm, Friday, December 4th, 2026
Abstract
A defining feature of the primate brain is its social acumen. Humans and other highly social species continuously navigate diverse social contexts and make decisions shaped by prosocial, antisocial, or other strategic preferences. This talk will give an overview of ongoing work on the behavioral and neural mechanisms of social decision-making and social interaction in nonhuman primates. Focusing on the prefrontal–amygdala circuits, it examines the neural codes representing decision variables for self and other, the interactive gaze variables guiding dynamic social attention, and the inter-areal coordination supporting prosocial preference. In the context of naturalistic, continuous interactions, the talk examines how animals deploy flexible social strategies and how the prefrontal cortex integrates social evidence from partners to support mutually cooperative behavior. Together, these studies help elucidate the neural substrates of social decision-making and interaction, offering insight into the evolutionary roots of human social cognition
Past Events
