Dr Benedetto De Martino, University College London

Building models of the environment to guide decisions in the face of uncertainty

In this talk I will present two recent studies conducted in my lab, which investigate how humans use different sources of information to make inferences and to guide choice. I will discuss how our prior preferences shape our inferences about the environment - in both social and non social contexts. I will then compare different computational models to explore how this phenomenon arises, as well as discussing its potential adaptive role. In the second part of the talk I will discuss the role of confidence while we update our models of the world, and how confidence interplay with action to guide behaviour. And I will point out how a disfunction in this process might underpin some of the symptoms that characterise obsessive-compulsive disorder.

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