• Decision making and reward processing in the brain
• Impulsivity, self-control and temporal reward discounting
• Neuroeconomics
• Prefrontal cortex
• Human neuroimaging
  
• Tetrode and single cell recordings
  

When we make decisions, we do not always decide to our longterm benefit since decisions that lead to a desirable outcome on a short run often turn out to be detrimental on the long run. The systematic preference for a less advantageous, but immediate reward over a more advantageous, but future reward is called impulsive choice behaviour,the opposite preference pattern is called self-controlled choice behaviour, and the process of choosing between different future rewards is called intertemporal decision making. Increased impulsivity is characteristic for a large range of pathological states, including pathologicalgambling, attention deficit disorder, manic-depression, drug addiction and frontal lobe syndrome. Not only people with such neuropathologies, but also healthy subjects, and in fact virtually all living species, are impulsive to some degree. Even when their decisions are not necessarily economically unfavourable, the intertemporal choice behaviour of most organisms violates several assumptions of normatively flavoured models of intertemporal choice, such as discounted utility theory. Therefore, the research on impulsive, irrational decisions has wide implications, even for everyday economics. For instance, decisions on investing money into a pension fund, or buying or selling shares at the stock market are often made impulsively, short-sightedly and onagut-level. The newly emerging field of neuroeconomics aims to target the behavioural and neural processes underlying this (un-)economical decision making. In our lab, we are investigating intertemporal choices on a behavioural, electrophysiological and systems level, using tetrode recordings in freely moving rats and neuroimaging methods in humans. Our results will help to advance our knowledge about diseases that are characterised by increased impulsiveness, but will also contribute to understand choice behaviour in economic contexts.

Relevant articles:

Kalenscher T, Pennartz CMA (2008). Is a Bird in the Hand Worth Two in the Future? The Neuroeconomics of Intertemporal Decision-Making. Progr Neurobiol, 84, 284-315

Kalenscher T, Windmann S, Diekamp B, Rose J, Güntürkün O, Colombo M (2005). Single Units in the Pigeon Brain Integrate Reward Amount and Time-to-Reward in an Impulsive Choice Task. Curr Biol, 15, 594-602.