1/16/2024 0 Comments Keyshot environments downloadRobbins’ definition confines economics to the study of human behavior, he sought to distinguish economics from the natural sciences, and he firmly opposed attempts to “vivisect the economic agent” (Maas, 2009). I then sketch some recent developments that hold great promise for advancing our understanding of structure–function relationships in neuroscience in general and in the neuroeconomic study of decision making in particular.Īt first glance, this formulation seems a dry and inauspicious note on which to launch a discussion of the behavioral and neurobiological study of economic decision making in animals. I present a rationale for marshaling convergent experimental methods to ground psychological and computational processes in the activity of identified neural populations, and I discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and complementarity of the individual approaches. Some successes achieved by applying the model are discussed, along with limitations, and evidence is presented regarding the roles played by several different neural populations in processes posited by the model. Central to this discussion is an empirically based, functional/computational model of how the subjective intensity of the electrical reward is computed and combined with subjective costs so as to determine the allocation of time to the pursuit of reward. To illustrate a neuroeconomic perspective on decision making in non-human animals, I discuss research on the rewarding effect of electrical brain stimulation. Some historical developments are reviewed that render such a view more plausible today than would have been the case in Robbins’ time. Nonetheless, I extend his definition to the behavior of non-human animals, rooting my account in psychological processes and their neural underpinnings. Robbins confined his definition to human behavior, and he strove to separate economics from the natural sciences in general and from psychology in particular. Almost 80 years ago, Lionel Robbins proposed a highly influential definition of the subject matter of economics: the allocation of scarce means that have alternative ends.
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