Metacognition and the value of information in decision making

Lecture by Laurence T. Maloney, 2019-2020 resident of the Paris IAS, Professor of Psychology, New York University, as part of the "Sciences in Context" cycle organized by the Centre de recherche interdisciplinaire and the Paris IAS.

Presentation

Sciences in Context is a series of public lectures, organized by Muriel Mambrini and Pascal Kolbe, in collaboration with the Institut d'études avancées de Paris, aimed at bringing SHS concepts and perspectives to the CRI community. The topics of the conference will be discussed at a public session of the Practical Philosophy Club on the Friday before each conference, in order to encourage discussion with the guest speaker.

Subject

In executing any speeded movement, there is uncertainty about the outcome. A large part of the uncertainty is due to perceptual and motor variability. In economic environments where the possible outcomes of any movement carry reward or punishment, your plans and decisions should reflect knowledge of your own uncertainty, a form of metacognition.

In this talk, I will present a Bayesian (based on probabilities) theoretic decision model of ideal movement planning based on metacognition, and describe recent experiments testing the model.