Micro Theory Cluster Seminar: Soo Hong Chew - Intelligence, Situation Awareness, and Context Sensitive Choice
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A/EC201 meeting room, Alcuin College, Campus West, University of York (Map)
Event details
Author: Soo Hong Chew (Southwestern)
Abstract: Intelligence refers to the ability to perceive situations in general and make decisions towards accomplishing goals. In The Principles of Psychology, James (1890) describes consciousness as a “stream” – a continuous, dynamic process that facilitates the perception of the environment. In Why Consciousness, Aumann (2024) argues that such experiential consciousness evolved to enable the experience of incentives, which underpins goal seeking behavior such as preference maximization implicit in economic decision making. Aumann leaves open the question of “How” which we address by relying on brain plasticity at the synaptic level. We hypothesize that the experience of incentive emerges from the modulation of synaptic plasticity respectively by the gain and loss oriented neurochemicals of dopamine and serotonin. In tandem with another pair of neurochemicals, acetylcholine and norepinephrine modulating attention and salience respectively, we arrive at a neurochemical model of context sensitive choice which is inherently reference dependent and encompasses a rich range of choice phenomena.
Host: Yuan Ju (York)
Cluster: Micro Theory