Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience - Special Issue: Uncertainty in Learning and Decision-Making

Guest Editors:  

Ifat Levy, Yale University

Daniela Schiller, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine

Coping with uncertainty is one of the main tasks facing the brain. Uncertainty is inherent to almost any situation we encounter. It surrounds our perception of the environment; complicates learning associations between outcomes and cues; and makes it hard to choose among available options. Individuals vary substantially in their tolerance of uncertainty; some will jeopardize their health, wealth and wellbeing for a small chance of reward, while others avoid even the slightest uncertainty. These individual differences are important, because they largely shape who we are, and are linked to variability in a host of maladaptive behaviors and mental disorders. For these reasons, behavior under uncertainty is a topic of both empirical and theoretical research in disciplines ranging from philosophy to neuroscience and from marketing to psychiatry.

This special issue includes empirical papers, reviews, and opinions from scholars in various fields, who discuss the conceptualization of uncertainty, methodology for studying it, and recent findings on the cognitive, emotional, and neural mechanisms of learning and decision making under uncertainty, as well as practical and clinical implications for these findings.

Published Articles:

Hierarchical inference as a source of human biases (this opens in a new tab)

Paul B. Sharp, Isaac Fradkin & Eran Eldar