Project at HIAS
Idiosyncratic Decision-Making as a Flexible Information Bottleneck
Why do different people make different decisions when given the same information? These differences occur when the decisions are between many or few alternatives, are based on complex or simple sources of information, and have well- or ill-defined goals. This ubiquity of individual variability implies that the underlying causes are not merely circumstantial but rather inherent to how the brain forms decisions. Joshua Gold’s ongoing work has begun to identify one potential source of this variability: one or more „information bottlenecks“ in the brain that limit the information we use to make decisions, thus limiting the efficacy of those decisions. Gold and his team have already developed behavioral and theoretical tools to study these bottlenecks. His work at the University of Hamburg will extend these studies to include cutting-edge measurements of activity in the human brain that will help identify how and where these bottlenecks occur and how they exert their influence on behavior. This work is designed to provide a solid foundation of understanding that will support future work to: 1) expand our basic understanding of the factors that facilitate and limit our cognitive abilities, 2) establish new ways to diagnose and treat disorders of decision-making, and 3) develop artificial decision-making systems that can potentially overcome some of the suboptimalities and biases imposed by these biological bottlenecks.
His Tandem Partner is Tobias Donner, Professor of Integrative Neuroscience at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.
Website
Funding
The HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.
Tandem
Prof. Dr. med. Tobias H. Donner, Integrative Neuroscience, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE)
Biography
Joshua Gold obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Neural Sciences from Brown University in 1991, where he studied under the supervision of Drs. Mark Bear and Leon Cooper. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Neuroscience from Stanford University 1992–1997 under the supervision of Dr. Eric Knudsen, while at the same time working part-time as a research scientist in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, Inc. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Washington 1998–2002 with Dr. Michael Shadlen. He then joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is currently a Professor of Neuroscience and Co-Director of the Computational Neuroscience Initiative (CNI). At Penn he has also been deeply involved in mentoring and training, including serving as Chair of the Neuroscience Graduate Group for 12 years (2012–2023). He has been awarded a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, Burroughs-Wellcome Career Award, McKnight Fellowship, and has received competitive grants from the National Eye Institute, National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, the Brain Initiative, and the Office of Naval Research. He has served on numerous national and international grant-review panels and is currently a Senior Editor for eLife.
Joshua Gold’s scientific contributions have focused primarily on how the brain learns to deal effectively with uncertain information that must be weighed and combined over time. Much of his earlier work addressed two important principles: 1) the brain can approximate statistically optimal decision processes such as the sequential probability ratio test balance an inherent trade-off between speed and accuracy; and 2) the underlying mechanisms are closely related to the behavioral context, such that decisions are often formed explicitly as action plans. Later studies in his laboratory further extended these principles to identify neural substrates of perceptual learning, which can involve experience-dependent changes in the efficiency with which sensory input is transformed into an action plan. More recently, his laboratory has been working on extending these principles even further to more realistic, dynamic environments that require adaptive processes to interpret incoming information according to changing contexts. This work has shown novel contributions of mechanisms of arousal and stress, which can be measured via changes in pupil diameter and other physiological variables and likely involve changes in the amount and timing of release of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine in the brain, to both normative and non-normative modulations of ongoing inference processes in the brain.
Joshua Gold‘s HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by the University of Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.