IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cai/reldbu/rel_783_0073.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ready to Face the Future: Brain Mechanisms for Cognitive Flexibility and Exploration

Author

Listed:
  • Sylvain Charron
  • Sven Collette

Abstract

Solving the exploration/exploitation trade-off is a fundamental issue for an organism living in an uncertain and changing environment. This review describes how a stream of cognitive neuroscience studies linked exploratory behaviour to structures in the human prefrontal cortex, then identified the brain mechanisms involved in the online adaptation of behaviour relatively to reward changes, and finally revealed fundamental limitations in the processing of information at the prefrontal level. The experiments and the results we present could particularly be of interest to economists who want to understand how cognitive neuroscience identify key processes in the human brain and shapes our understanding of decision-making. JEL Classification: D87, D81, D83, C91.

Suggested Citation

  • Sylvain Charron & Sven Collette, 2012. "Ready to Face the Future: Brain Mechanisms for Cognitive Flexibility and Exploration," Recherches économiques de Louvain, De Boeck Université, vol. 78(3), pages 73-81.
    • Handle: RePEc:cai:reldbu:rel_783_0073
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.cairn.info/load_pdf.php?ID_ARTICLE=REL_783_0073
    Download Restriction: free
    File URL: http://www.cairn.info/revue-recherches-economiques-de-louvain-2012-3-page-73.htm
    Download Restriction: free
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    neuroeconomics; exploration; prefrontal cortex;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D87 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Neuroeconomics
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty
    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cai:reldbu:rel_783_0073. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Jean-Baptiste de Vathaire (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cairn.info/revue-recherches-economiques-de-louvain.htm .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.