About our Group

The Learning and Decision Making Group is a research group based at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) of the University of Trento, Italy. Currently, the group is funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant entitled "Transfer Learning Within and Between Brains" obtained by Giorgio Coricelli for the period 2014-2019.

Research interests

Neuroeconomics, experimental economics, game theory.

We study human behaviors emerging from the interplay of cognitive and emotional systems. Our research agenda includes two main projects. The first one concerns the role of emotions in decision making, and the second is aimed at investigating the relational complexity in social interaction. Our objective is to apply robust methods and findings from behavioral decision theory to study the brain structures that contribute to forming judgments and decisions, both in an individual and a social context.

We study:

• the role of counterfactual emotions, such as regret and envy, in decision making;
• the neural basis of bounded rational behavior, limits in depth of strategic reasoning;
• the neural correlates of individual and social uncertainty (disposition effect, aspiration level, strategic uncertainty);
• how the brain encodes learning signals: regret/fictive learning, reputation building;
• impaired decision making in schizophrenia and autism.

We conduct our research using a fundamentally multidisciplinary approach (neuroeconomics), drawing from behavioral and experimental economics, game theory, neuroimaging (fMRI), neuropsychology (patients studies), cognitive neurosciences, computational modelling and machine learning.