Crcns US-german collaborative research proposal: neural and computational mechanisms of flexible goal-directed decision making

Active Project Grant Awarded Last action

Award ID
2520024
Recipient
Awarding agency
Obligated
$311,746

Award facts

Assistance listing
47.075 Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
Completion date 62% complete
Place of performance
Berkeley, CA 94710, USA

Award details come from USAspending.gov.

Description

Abstract
To behave adaptively, people need to flexibly align their decisions with their immediate and long-term goals. Failures of such goal-directed decision-making can result in an array of maladaptive behaviors, such as financial risk taking, drug abuse, or gambling. While past research has helped identify the drivers of goal-directed decisions, there are still significant gaps in our understanding of how people are able to reorient those decisions as flexibly as they do, as well as when and why they fail to do so. In a series of studies that combine computational modeling with measures of behavior, attentional focus, and brain activity, we are studying the capacities and limits of human decision-makers to flexibly adjust their information search and actions to different goals and task demands. By uncovering the hidden levers and potential failure modes of goal-directed behavior, our work better disentangles sources of real-world decision-making failures, and provide a path towards targeted interventions to better align choices with long-term goals. Our project addresses critical gaps in research on the neural and computational mechanisms that link decision-making and cognitive control. Past work on the computational and neural mechanisms of goal-directed decision-making has been singularly focused on a narrow subset of human goals (how people select the best option from a set). IT is therefore unknown how people flexibly reconfigure to their wider array of goals ? For instance, selecting under different criteria or accumulating information across options rather than comparing between them ? And when and why they fail to do so. Our project develops and tests a computational framework that accommodates the range of flexibility observed in human decision-making, by representing explicit choice goals that define a) how information is translated into evidence and B) how evidence is then integrated to select responses. We are testing our framework in a series of studies that combine behavioral tasks with eye-tracking, EEG and fmri. This multi-modal approach allows US to uncover the neural circuits and dynamics that enable people to flexibly transform and integrate information about their options to achieve their current goals, and to understand how and why people vary in these capacities. The project further supports outreach activities aimed at training researchers in computational methods for predicting and testing a wide array of decision-making behavior. A companion project is being funded by the federal ministry of education and research, germany (BMBF). This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.- subawards are not planned for this award.

Transactions

Action Obligated Date
Amendment $0
Original award $311,746

Subawards

Subrecipient Amount Awarded
University Of Birmingham Project Description (including objectives, tasks, and deliverables as applicable): To characterize the neural and computational dynamics of flexible… $162,358

Quick answers

Who received award 2520024?

2520024 was awarded to The Regents Of The University Of California by Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (National Science Foundation) on October 1, 2024.

How much is award 2520024 worth?

$311,746 has been obligated on 2520024.

Which agency awarded 2520024?

Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences (National Science Foundation) awarded 2520024, with funding from National Science Foundation.

On GovTribe

See this award's full record

  • Every transaction and subaward
  • The recipient's other awards and teaming partners
  • Similar grant awards
  • Ask GovTribe AI about this award