Decision Neuroscience

Decision Neuroscience: An Integrative Perspective presents the most recent and compelling lesional, neuroimaging, electrophysiological, and computational studies, in combination with hormonal and genetic studies, which have led to a clearer understanding of the neural mechanisms behind reward and decision making. The neural bases of reward and decision-making processes are of critical interest to scientists because of the fundamental role that reward plays in a number of behavioral processes (such as motivation learning, and cognition), and because the neural bases have theoretical and clinical implications for understanding dysfunctions of the dopaminergic system in several neurological and psychiatric disorders. This book will constitute a comprehensive update of ground-breaking work addressing fundamental questions about the nature of behavior: how does the brain process reward and how does it make decisions when facing multiple options? And will feature entirely new content, as well as expanded coverage on drug and behavioral addiction, the role of subthalamus stimulation in neurological disorders and neuroeconomics.

• Provides comprehensive coverage of approaches to studying reward and decision making, including primate neurophysiology and brain-imaging studies in healthy humans and in various disorders, genetic and hormonal influences on the reward system, and computational models
• Discusses clinical implications of process dysfunction, including schizophrenia, Parkinson’s disease, eating disorders, drug addiction, and pathological gambling
• Uses multiple levels of analysis, from molecular mechanisms to neural systems dynamics and computational models