2023年12月6日，伟易博行为科学与政策干预交织立异团队乐成举行2023年秋季学期第四期（总第十七次）行为科学分享会。本次讲座约请到西南财经大学中国行为经济与行为金融研究中心全职教授、特聘主任Chew Soo Hong（周恕弘）教授，与我们分享他与Richard Ebstein教授相助的最新研究效果，主题为“Predictive Brain Plasticity, Choice Perception, and the Miserly Brain”。
分享人 The Speaker
Prof. Chew is Chief Professor at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, where he directs the China Center for Behavioral Economics and Finance. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society (2011), which awarded him the Leonard J. Savage thesis prize, and of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. He is an Emeritus Professor at NUS and has previously taught at HKUST, UC lrvine, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Arizona. He has published in top-tier journals such as Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Theory, Review of Economic Studies, International Economic Review as well as PNAS, Management Science, PRSB, Neuron, among many others.
Chew is one of the world’s foremost experts on economic models of decision-making. His first published paper (entitled “A Generalization of the Quasilinear Mean with Application to the Measurement of Income Inequality and Decision Theory Resolving the Allais Paradox” Econometrica, 1983) is one of the earliest to propose an alternative to the paradigmatic expected utility model established by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. Chew also explores other aspects of decision-making that are important to economists (such as temporal choice and mechanism design) and his research has embraced other methodologies beyond mathematical modeling, including experiments, neuro-imaging and genetic studies.
分享会 The Seminar
The realization that the human brain is dynamic and constantly changing arises from the seminal work of (Hebb, 1949) which posits how synaptic connections between neurons change over time based on their correlated activity with the insightful phrase about neuronal firing – “fire together, wire together”. This Hebbian ‘learning’, reflecting the brain's ability to change and adapt based on prior experiences, has led to the predictive brain plasticity hypothesis (Halvagal and Zenke, 2023) pointing to a mechanism which underpins the brain's proactive tendency to seek causal understanding by anticipating future events and conditions beyond reacting to stimuli as they arise. (A tiger’s roar cannot be confused with the harmless chirp of a bird.) This capacity to anticipate sensory contingencies without being surprised is crucial for survival while minimizing energy expenditure by our miserly brain (Friston, 2010; Clark, 2013; Hohwy, 2013) which seeks accuracy by updating priors along with synaptic weights.
In situations involving risk and uncertainty, how available choices are perceived may have pivotal influence on the eventual decision and the corresponding outcomes. Building on predictive brain plasticity along with the neurochemistry of attention and valuation, we propose a neurobiological model of sensory choice perception from sensation (of stimuli) to perception of the options in a choice situation (especially the consequentialist aspects of the specific choices) through attention and memory (necessarily selective) prior to their evaluation in which cognition has a natural role. Given the inherent scarcity of attention, stimuli surviving the initial filtration are allocated attention in proportion to surprise (when error or deviation from the predictive prior surpasses a certain threshold), which is costly. This triggers the formation of a new prior modulated by a tendency to resist change called inertia. The resulting perceived choice is linked to observable decision making through an attention theory model (Chew, 1983; Chew, Wang, Zhong, 2023). We derive testable implications using for instance pharmacological intervention linking predictive brain plasticity to decision making, which delivers context dependent choice and accounts for several choice anomalies in the literature, including loss-gain framing, Allais behavior, ambiguity attitude, and source preference, from a sensory perception perspective.
