The goal of the proposed conference is to bring together researchers from various disciplines to discuss a common topic: how we make decisions and carry them out. Decision-making is central to human cognition, and as such is of interest both to those who strive to understand how the brain subserves the mind, as well as to those who strive to understand how the choices that we make impact our societal and economic infrastructure - and vice versa. Ultimately, understanding the capacity of healthy individuals to make decisions will be of critical importance for understanding how this capacity fails in substance abuse and a variety of neurological disorders. The confirmed speakers for this conference will be presenting research and theories from the various perspectives of psychology, cognitive and systems neuroscience, economics, management, and political science. A key goal of this conference is to foster cross-fertilization between these different perspectives in order to generate novel questions and insights into decision-making. The speakers will describe work from the neuronal level to the behavioral level in the developing organism and the adult. Data will be presented both from healthy individuals and drug abusers.
