02/10: Akram Bakkour

[ehuppert]

Comment below with a well-developed group question about the reading for this week's workshop. Please collaborate with your groups on Hypothesis (via the Canvas page) to develop your question.

One person can submit on the group's behalf and put the Group Name in the submission for credit. Your group only needs to post on assigned week (rotating every other week).

Please post your question by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least three of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. Everyone in the group needs to upvote! You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[Thiyaghessan]

Group 2A: Thiyaghessan, Eliot Weinstein, Sushan Zhao, Linhui Wu

Hi Professor,

Thank you for taking the time to share your research with us. I had a question regarding the second experiment involving amnesic patients. I am wondering if there are any limitations to your experimental findings' generalizability given that the sample only has 6 individuals and 15 controls. However, I also understand that practical constraints often impede a research team's ability to recruit participants in any experiment. Given these constraints, how did you ensure that you extracted the maximal utility from this sample and do you have any advice for researchers looking to conduct experiments involving a small number of participants?

I had a second question involving amnesia. I do not have a background in neuroscience and as I understand it amnesia refers to memory loss. Does it occur exclusively with damage to the hippocampus? And are there variations in the nature/magnitude of amnesia an afflicted individual suffers from that is dependent on the part of the hippocampus that is damaged?

And finally, I had a final question regarding the proposed heuristic model. Given that the evidence supporting this model is mixed, what sort of evidence would you need to have either a stronger confirmation/rejection of its validity?

[Sirius2713]

Group 2F: Wenqian Zhang, Gabriel Nicholson, Sophie Wang and Xin Tang

Hi Professor Bakkour,

Thanks for sharing your research with us. Our group has two main questions:

1. What is the relationship of perceptual decisions and value-based decisions? Is it possible for a decision to be dynamic, like a few seconds ago it seems to be a perceptual decision, but very soon it becomes a value-based decision? Is there a clear dividing line for these two types decisions? And are there any real-life applications that this kind of findings can achieve?
2. Among 6 patients in experiment 2, only one patient is female. Is it possible gender or hormone may impact the results of this experiment?

[tangn121]

Group 2H: Ning Tang, Egemen Pamukcu, Taize Yu, Gin Zheng

Thank you Professor Bakkour for joining our workshop. We have two questions.

First, we know that people’s behaviors will be largely influenced by brand loyalty and familiarity(refers to the availability heuristic). If participants see a food brand they really like, or a food they already know the market price of it, they might make really quick decisions compared to two unfamiliar food brands. We are wondering if hippocampus may play different role in such decisions, will the influence of hippocampus be the same under these different situations?

Also, real-life problems might be a mix of value-based and other types of decisions, we are also curious about the role of hippocampus in such situations.

[xzmerry]

Group 2I: William Zhu (*), Zimei Xia, Daniela Vadillo, Lingfeng Shan

Hi Prof Bakkour,

Thank you for sharing this interesting research, our group has questions as follows:

• First, we’d like to inquire about the meaning of “value-based decisions”. This research suggests that, when people decide whether they prefer snack A versus snack B, their hippocampus helps them recall past memories of trying these two snacks. We have two related questions about this point:

  1. How important is the role of “emotion” in value-based decisions? When people recall how much they “like” or “dislike” a certain snack, do their memory systems (hippocampus) also link to their emotional systems (prefrontal cortex) to motivate them to choose the snack they like more?
  2. If a person has never tried a snack C before, how does the person make value-based decisions about snack C? Do they observe the snack’s package or brand and link them to associated memory?

• The second question is about the economic intuition of these psychological findings. Decisions and related strategies are important topics in economics. For choices, we usually impose an assumption of rationality in economics, and this assumes that any two choices are comparable based on their value/utility. Previously, we thought that a choice depends more on the value of the choice itself, but now we know that our indifference between two choices might be related to our own physical attributes (especially the effect is more prominent when the decisions are value-based). This might imply that we should rethink the economic implication of a choice:

  1. how much of a choice is related to the physical attributes of an individual?
  2. And how much of a choice is due to consideration and trade-off of economic utility?

• Hippocampus was often believed to play important role in memory. Could high activities in Hippocampus indicate that people would inherently make decisions based on previous experience even on the most abstract matters?

• The last question is more of a technical question: we wonder how inference and conclusion are made when the sample size is small in an experiment. Because it seems that central limit theorem could not be applied under this situation.

[AlexPrizzy]

Group 2L: Jingwen Ni, Alex Przybycin, Allison Towey, David Xu, Sirui Zhou

Can value-based decision making be trained to make faster and better choices? Either for those with brain injuries or for everyone even those with healthy brains. Value-based decisions may take more time to be processed than perceptual-based decisions due to the process of collecting information to make an evidence based decision in value-based conditions. Maybe decision making could be enhanced by more efficient use or increased capacity of working memory?

[wanxii]

Group2B: Justin Soll, Hongkai Mao, Wanxi Zhou, Coco Yu

Thank you for sharing your interesting work with us!

We have several questions:

1. Everyone wants to quickly make some smart decisions. Facing a same perceptual question, someone people can quickly make decisions when some can't. Inspired by this research, we are wondering if there are any approaches we can take to reduce the time we use to make decisions.

2. Though might not very familiar with the general experiment settings of this related field, we do wonder if the small sample size (6 subjects) of the second experiment would sufficiently testify and support the causality of the hypothesis in statistics.

3. Prefrontal cortex is usually associated with decision-making process. How do you anticipate the hippocampus will interact with prefrontal cortex to form decision making? Also, does the involvement of hippocampus imply that value-based decisions often requires explicit memories but not implicit ones?

[LuZhang0128]

Group 2C: Fengyi Zheng, Taichi Tsujikawa, Lu Zhang, Haohan Shi:

Hi Prof Bakkour, Thank you for sharing this amazing research paper. We have some questions regarding the paper:

1. Since we do not have any neuroscience background, we wonder if there are any social-science-related implications of this result? For instance, when doing interviews and surveys in social science, a lot of questions are value-based. Does that mean we need to adjust the amount of time given to the participants based on their psychological attributes in order to mitigate potential bias?
2. We wonder if the time would increase or decrease as the number of tasks goes up. For instance, when doing the first decision it only takes 2 sec while the 10th decision may take 7 sec, or vise versa. Is there a way for us to train ourselves and perform better in these decision-making tasks?

Thank you!

[chuqingzhao]

Group 2D: Yijing Zhang, Chuqing Zhao, Mike Packard, Alex Williamson

1. How should the distinction between external and internal processes in decision-making map onto our conceptions of responsibility and even rationality in our social theory? Relatedly, do you see the neural/computational approach you take being relevant to more traditional social sciences disciplines or the humanities, as they seek to understand behavior? I am also wondering behind decision-making between value-based, perceptual tasks, how to interpret the human behavior by incorporating external and internal process together?
2. Why longer decision time indicates more engagement of hippocampus? Would some stronger hippocampus process the information quicker than the weak ones? Also, how did you conclude that the longer time is caused by hippocampus?

Thank you!

[nswxin]

Group 2G: Kaylah Thomas, Awaid Yasin, Shengwenxin Ni, Yao Yao

Dear Professor Bakkour, Thank you for coming and sharing this significant knowledge about human beings! We find your research super meaningful in improving mankind to be better. You've mentioned that the experiment participants were "thirty-three healthy participants recruited through flyers posted on campus and the surrounding area in New York City". I am wondering whether the backgrounds of the participants would affect the results, for example, other factors other than age and body features, for instance, race, cultural backgrounds, eating habits, and even climates. Can you please elaborate more on why only factors of age and health status are more important considerations than the others?

[koichionogi]

Group 2K: Jinfei Zhu, Baotong Zhang, Senling Shu, Koichi Onogi:

Dear Professor Bakkour,

Thank you so much for presenting your research! We have some questions about your paper.

1. Among those experimental activities with effects in the hippocampus, was there any recognized tendency of certain activities having more bold effects on hippocampus? Is there any activities that does not really effect hippocampus?
2. How would difficulty be measured normally? Could the measured difficulties affect to individuals differently? (Like some people solve certain questions, which is considered/measured as difficult questions, easier than other questions that are measured as easy?)
3. Would there be general features of hippocampus, such as higher energy consumption compared with other parts of brain? Could this difference affect individuals behaviors? (such as people tend to avoid deliberation-required thought process due to its high stress )

[XinSu6]

Group 2M: Chenming Zhang, Chris Maurice, Xin Su, Yujing Sun

Dear Professor Bakkour,

Thank you for sharing the work with us. Our group enjoyed reading it a lot and have found the hippocampus part to be really insightful.

We are wondering is there any correlation between the perceptual decisions and value-based decisions? And does this correlation affect the hippocampus part in any way? Also, can the psychological conclusions in this paper be applied to any other fields? Have there been any implications found in other disciplines related to your results? In addition, would you think some of the factors in the second experiment design can cause some bias? Such as the age and gender part? How do you think this can influence the conclusions of the paper and do you think they can be fixed in any way?

Looking forward to your presentation

[NikkiTing]

Group 2E: Juno Wu, Nikki Ting, Franco Mendes, Brenda Wu

Hi, Professor! Thank you for sharing your work. We have some questions regarding the paper:

1. If memory that is encoded in hippocampus is related to hippocampus’ ability to guide value-based decisions, then how can we explain the relation between perceptual decisions and memory? How can we study that?

2. We were also wondering if the researchers could conduct post-experiment interviews to better understand the deliberation process of the participants, especially the amnesic patients. Would this have helped determine whether the drift-diffusion models or heuristic model better explain the results found?

We look forward to your presentation.

[Emily-fyeh]

Dear Prof. Bakkour, My group have the following questions after reading your paper:

-We are very interested in your research. But your research is based on a central hypothesis. So we would want to know what the significance of the experimental results is? Is it necessary to conduct a robustness test?

• This question relates to the experimental design in using the value-based test to observe hippocampus engagement for “non-memory” related tasks: Doesn’t this task still naturally require the engagement of memory seeing as the participant must register their familiarity and past knowledge about each item’s value?
• Separately, the gender spread in amnesiac pool and the healthy controls were imbalanced with the amnesiac pool skewed to M with only one F. Are there any concerns that this gender imbalance may affect the findings?
• We also wonder if this kind of decision-making is a fixed feature of injury or if it's a way that training can be done to enhance the ability of people with dysfunction to make better choices.
• What are the rationales for altering the value-based and perceptual decision tasks in experiment 2. Is there any common practice for conducting the experiment on amnesic patients?

Thank you so much! Group 2J (Kuitai Wang, Zhe Zhang, Emily Yeh, Helen Yap)