Make up your mind! - Dissociating the roles of orbitofrontal cortex and striatum in human decision making. How we make everyday decisions is a crucial behaviour of humans but the underlying processes in the brain are still poorly understood. This project will investigate what the roles of specific brain regions are in human decision making, which enable us to gain a better understanding of how these brain structures contribute to our decisions.
Industrial Transformation Training Centres - Grant ID: IC210100008
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$4,282,859.00
Summary
ARC Training Centre for Behavioural Insights for Technology Adoption (BITA). Australia needs accelerated adoption of innovation technologies to improve outcomes in health, agriculture and cybersecurity. Despite technically viable solutions, innovations fail to be adopted due to behavioural barriers. Behavioural approaches can promote significant gains by bridging the barriers to technology adoption. The Centre for Behavioural Insights for Technology Adoption will boost national productivity by i ....ARC Training Centre for Behavioural Insights for Technology Adoption (BITA). Australia needs accelerated adoption of innovation technologies to improve outcomes in health, agriculture and cybersecurity. Despite technically viable solutions, innovations fail to be adopted due to behavioural barriers. Behavioural approaches can promote significant gains by bridging the barriers to technology adoption. The Centre for Behavioural Insights for Technology Adoption will boost national productivity by identifying, designing and evaluating solutions that address these barriers. By uniting industry and government with world-leading interdisciplinary researchers, the Centre will build transformative capability in people, data and solutions and support Australian organisations to achieve higher returns on technology investment.Read moreRead less
A new training approach to address the novice driver problem. This project aims to develop a new approach to driver training. For the second consecutive year, road deaths in Australia have increased by 150 from 2014 to 2016. The increase in deaths was greatest for young drivers between the ages of 17-25 years, who remain over-represented in road deaths. The majority of these deaths occur in the first few months after licensing. This project expects to generate new knowledge, where the focus is o ....A new training approach to address the novice driver problem. This project aims to develop a new approach to driver training. For the second consecutive year, road deaths in Australia have increased by 150 from 2014 to 2016. The increase in deaths was greatest for young drivers between the ages of 17-25 years, who remain over-represented in road deaths. The majority of these deaths occur in the first few months after licensing. This project expects to generate new knowledge, where the focus is on developing young driver’s cognitive skills about speed choice through the provisions of a training program that focuses on feedback. The results will have the potential to be used by road authorities and driver training organisations to improve road safety.Read moreRead less
Attention please! Selective attention and human associative learning. Selective attention allows us to pick useful pieces of information out of the mass of stimulation that we're faced with every moment. This project investigates how what we've previously learnt about the significance of events influences whether we'll pick them out as useful in future, and how this might be impaired by old age or mental disorder.
Context dependent flower choice in honey bees. This project aims to discover the strategies honey bees use when choosing between multiple flowers. The choices that honey bees make about which flowers to visit and which to avoid has significant impacts on crop yields, the spread of invasive weeds, and the conservation of native plants. This project expects to generate new knowledge in the fields of behavioural and pollination ecology through a combination of field experiments and modelling. Expec ....Context dependent flower choice in honey bees. This project aims to discover the strategies honey bees use when choosing between multiple flowers. The choices that honey bees make about which flowers to visit and which to avoid has significant impacts on crop yields, the spread of invasive weeds, and the conservation of native plants. This project expects to generate new knowledge in the fields of behavioural and pollination ecology through a combination of field experiments and modelling. Expected outcomes of this project include enhanced capacity in the field of pollination ecology, and new insight into flower preferences in the world’s most important commercial pollinator. This should provide significant benefits to food production and security as one third of the world’s crops benefit from insect pollination.Read moreRead less
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE140101181
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$384,183.00
Summary
How Do Our Past Decisions Affect Our Present Decisions? – An Innovative Model. Decisions under time pressure made in the past have a tendency to affect our current decisions. This phenomenon is often termed ‘sequential effects’. Typically, sequential effects are explained by positing the existence of a psychological mechanism that is specifically aimed at resolving conflicting information. The aim of this project is to develop a computational model that produces sequential effects naturally. Inn ....How Do Our Past Decisions Affect Our Present Decisions? – An Innovative Model. Decisions under time pressure made in the past have a tendency to affect our current decisions. This phenomenon is often termed ‘sequential effects’. Typically, sequential effects are explained by positing the existence of a psychological mechanism that is specifically aimed at resolving conflicting information. The aim of this project is to develop a computational model that produces sequential effects naturally. Innovatively, this model would remove the need for an explicit conflict monitoring mechanism. This project is significant because it progresses our understanding of how humans deal with conflict. The expected outcome is a comprehensive, quantitative account of sequential effects in human decision making.Read moreRead less
Risky Futures: Toward a Computational Process Model of Risky Inter-Temporal Choice. A lot is known about people’s preferences. People like their rewards now. Most would prefer $10 today than $20 in one month. Risk is also unattractive; a certain $10 is more attractive than a 50 per cent chance of receiving $25. Surprisingly, much less is known about the interaction between delay and risk. That is, relatively little is known about whether people prefer $10 now, or a 50 per cent chance of $50 in ....Risky Futures: Toward a Computational Process Model of Risky Inter-Temporal Choice. A lot is known about people’s preferences. People like their rewards now. Most would prefer $10 today than $20 in one month. Risk is also unattractive; a certain $10 is more attractive than a 50 per cent chance of receiving $25. Surprisingly, much less is known about the interaction between delay and risk. That is, relatively little is known about whether people prefer $10 now, or a 50 per cent chance of $50 in one month. This project will use a combination of experiments and cognitive modelling to examine all three types of choice. The outcome will be a novel computational model that will elucidate the complex interaction between delay and risk, thereby answering an enduring question in the literature: are risk and delay psychologically equivalent?Read moreRead less
Super Financial Security: Improving Flexibility, Trust and Communication. This project aims to address the significant worldwide challenge of how to safeguard financial wellbeing at older ages. In doing so it aims to investigate three important and interconnected influences on retirement preparation: flexible choice architecture, trust formation and effective communication. The project aims to use a combination of innovative modelling, experimental and field-based approaches. The principal expec ....Super Financial Security: Improving Flexibility, Trust and Communication. This project aims to address the significant worldwide challenge of how to safeguard financial wellbeing at older ages. In doing so it aims to investigate three important and interconnected influences on retirement preparation: flexible choice architecture, trust formation and effective communication. The project aims to use a combination of innovative modelling, experimental and field-based approaches. The principal expected outcomes are insights into the factors that guide superannuation choice, build trust with superannuation providers, and ensure clear and effective communication with members.Read moreRead less
I like you and I just can't help it: Explaining automatic affective responses. Our automatic affective responses are crucial in determining how we behave particularly in situations where there is little conscious deliberation. These automatic responses have been implicated in dysfunctional behaviours such as unhealthy food choices and racial bias. However very little research has investigated the psychological processes responsible for the formation of these automatic affective responses. The ai ....I like you and I just can't help it: Explaining automatic affective responses. Our automatic affective responses are crucial in determining how we behave particularly in situations where there is little conscious deliberation. These automatic responses have been implicated in dysfunctional behaviours such as unhealthy food choices and racial bias. However very little research has investigated the psychological processes responsible for the formation of these automatic affective responses. The aim of this project is to investigate the role of conditioning and cognitive processes in the formation and expression of automatic affective responses. This will allow for the development of novel interventions targeting automatic responses which contribute to dysfunctional behaviour. Read moreRead less
The Neural Bases of Decision-Making. The smooth integration of cognitive and emotional processes is necessary for everyday decisions. Dysfunction in this integrative capacity accompanies dementia, neurodegenerative conditions and major psychiatric disorders. This project seeks to understand the neural bases of this integration in normal decision-making using cutting edge behavioural, cellular, molecular and genetic tools to map the neural system, circuit and cellular processes controlling the se ....The Neural Bases of Decision-Making. The smooth integration of cognitive and emotional processes is necessary for everyday decisions. Dysfunction in this integrative capacity accompanies dementia, neurodegenerative conditions and major psychiatric disorders. This project seeks to understand the neural bases of this integration in normal decision-making using cutting edge behavioural, cellular, molecular and genetic tools to map the neural system, circuit and cellular processes controlling the selection, evaluation and choice of goal-directed actions. Such actions can, with continued practice, transition into relatively inflexible habits. Thus, this project aims to investigate the neural processes that mediate this transition and how actions and habits interact in normal decision-making.Read moreRead less