Excited to be participating in the workshop on Decision Making and Information Processing in Complex Settings in Lucca (Italy) April 27-28. There's a great lineup, with Giorgio Coricelli, Susann Fiedler, Andreas Glöckner, and Carlos Alós-Ferrer. Join us! decisionmaking.imtlucca.it
We are so thrilled to welcome new colleagues Erie Boorman, @maureenritchey.bsky.social, and @ajaysatpute.bsky.social to UCLA. What an exciting day for UCLA Psychology! #neuroeconomics
We also worked with wonderful collaborators on this project from The Ohio State University's School of Communication - Prof. Jason Coronel, and @elizaeriggs.bsky.social, now at the College of Charleston.
Building on past attentional drift diffusion model (aDDM) work, we find that gaze has a stronger effect on choice for more important issues. This work shows how ballot design can influence political outcomes, by drawing attention to certain options. Project led by former student Taro Yang at UPenn.
New paper in @cognitionjournal.bsky.social, where we show how attention impacts political choices. With an eye-tracking study, we find that people's votes aren't set in stone - they take longer to vote on divisive issues and can be swayed by gaze manipulations. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
Belated congratulations to our former labmate Miruna Cotet
for her Paper of the Year Award from the Society for Neuroeconomics. The award celebrates her work on the cognitive dynamics of bargaining, using eBay data, published in PNAS. pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1... #SNE2025
That’s a wrap for #SNE2025! Grateful for the chance to share some of our recent work as a spotlight this year and thankful to the society for supporting me as one of this year’s travel award winners along with @gloriawfeng.bsky.social, @jaehyungwoo.bsky.social, Laura Globig, and Minho Hwang)!
For anyone on the west side of Los Angeles, I'll be at the Rosegold Saloon tomorrow evening, presenting at the Pint of Science event there. I'll be giving an overview of my lab's research, pub style. We'll be wrestling with the age-old question - ale or lager? pintofscience.us/event/from-b...
Excited to share a new Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper that I had the pleasure to be a part of. This is an interdisciplinary perspective on the dynamics of cognitive costs, namely when these costs occur and how they impact our decisions. #neuroeconomics www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The West Coast Neuroeconomics Mini-Symposium hosted by @radyschool.bsky.social just wrapped on Saturday, and it was a genuinely fantastic (always too brief) few days of science.
rady.ucsd.edu/2025-west-co...
We also find that people look less at the Buy option when there are explicit outside options. Overall, we identify two different attentional mechanisms by which the framing of opportunity costs (i.e., the outside options) impacts people's willingness to make purchases. 3/n
Across surpluses, people consistently purchase less with explicit outside options. Using a variant of the attentional DDM, we estimated separate attention discounts on the Buy and Don't Buy options. We find more discounting of the Buy option with explicit vs implicit costs. 2/n
New article on the role of attention in opportunity-cost neglect, with the fabulous Steph Smith and @spillersas.bsky.social. Outside options that are explicit (Keep Money) vs implicit (Don't Buy), attract more attention, both gaze and gaze effect on choice. 1/n authors.elsevier.com/c/1kycc_Ebvv...
What was really striking was the similarity of the temporal weighting function between the perceptual and economic tasks, both in the aggregate and across subjects. We estimated these weighting functions by having subjects report averages in real time using a joystick in the MRI.
The paper was led by former student Minhee Yoo. She found that, in addition to the cuneus in both tasks, the left dlPFC tracked the average evidence in favor of an option, in the economic task. People with a stronger primacy bias had higher activity in cognitive control regions (dlPFC, IPS).
🚨New paper in CABN with Brandon Turner's lab🚨
We use an averaging diffusion model and fMRI to study how the brain estimates average evidence in perceptual and economic tasks. We find recency and primacy effects that are highly consistent across tasks. link.springer.com/article/10.3...
One puzzle that emerged is that buyers do not respond optimally to slow rejections, which should signal that a slightly higher offer will likely suffice. Instead buyers are less likely to make a followup offer in such cases. This work was led by former student Miruna Cotet. 3/3
We analyzed millions of eBay bargaining threads and ran a field experiment with thousands of our own offers. We showed that the drift-diffusion model can account for these decisions, extending the scope of these models from seconds to hours and days. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 2/3
Thrilled to share our new paper in PNAS on bargaining in the "wild" (eBay). We find that bargainers reveal private information by taking hours longer to reject good offers and accept bad offers. We can predict bargaining outcomes from response times. newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/res... 1/3
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