Glimcher Paul
Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Decision Making, New York University, New York, New York 10013
Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 2014;79:169-76. doi: 10.1101/sqb.2014.79.024778. Epub 2015 Jan 30.
Over the course of the last century, economists and ethologists have built detailed models from first principles of how humans and animals should make decisions. Over the course of the last few decades, psychologists and behavioral economists have gathered a wealth of data at variance with the predictions of these economic models. This has led to the development of highly descriptive models that can often predict what choices people or animals will make but without offering any insight into why people make the choices that they do--especially when those choices reduce a decision-maker's well-being. Over the course of the last two decades, neurobiologists working with economists and psychologists have begun to use our growing understanding of how the nervous system works to develop new models of how the nervous system makes decisions. The result, a growing revolution at the interdisciplinary border of neuroscience, psychology, and economics, is a new field called Neuroeconomics. Emerging neuroeconomic models stand to revolutionize our understanding of human and animal choice behavior by combining fundamental properties of neurobiological representation with decision-theoretic analyses. In this overview, one class of these models, based on the widely observed neural computation known as divisive normalization, is presented in detail. The work demonstrates not only that a discrete class of computation widely observed in the nervous system is fundamentally ubiquitous, but how that computation shapes behaviors ranging from visual perception to financial decision-making. It also offers the hope of reconciling economic analysis of what choices we should make with psychological observations of the choices we actually do make.
在上个世纪，经济学家和动物行为学家基于人类和动物应如何做决策的第一性原理构建了详细的模型。在过去几十年里，心理学家和行为经济学家收集了大量与这些经济模型预测不符的数据。这导致了高度描述性模型的发展，这些模型通常可以预测人们或动物会做出什么选择，但却无法深入了解人们为何做出他们所做的选择——尤其是当这些选择降低了决策者的幸福感时。在过去二十年里，与经济学家和心理学家合作的神经生物学家开始利用我们对神经系统工作方式日益深入的理解，来开发神经系统如何做决策的新模型。其结果是，在神经科学、心理学和经济学的跨学科边界上正在发生一场日益壮大的革命，催生了一个名为神经经济学的新领域。新兴的神经经济学模型通过将神经生物学表征的基本特性与决策理论分析相结合，有望彻底改变我们对人类和动物选择行为的理解。在本综述中，将详细介绍其中一类基于被广泛观察到的名为归一化分割的神经计算的模型。这项工作不仅表明在神经系统中广泛观察到的一类离散计算在根本上是普遍存在的，而且还展示了这种计算如何塑造从视觉感知到金融决策等各种行为。它还为调和关于我们应该做出什么选择的经济分析与关于我们实际做出的选择的心理学观察提供了希望。
