Natural Rationality

Showing posts with label blog. Show all posts

9/17/07

New feature: leave your comments

You can now leave comments after each blog post. I think it would be a great way to interact or exchange ideas. However, certain rules apply:

Comments are moderated.
A word verification program (Captcha) will make sure that you are a human.
Any comment that:

is abusive
is off-topic
contains ad-hominem attacks
promotes hate of any kind
uses excessively foul language
is blatantly spam
is too long
is only self-promotion

may be edited or deleted (a more detailed policy may be found there).

You can read "Lifehacker's guide to weblog comments" for more details about blog comments netiquette.

Looking forward to reading you,
Benoit.

8/7/07

Two blogs carnivals: philosophy and neuroscience

But first, what is a blog carnival?

A blog carnival is a type of blog event. It is similar to a magazine, in that it is dedicated to a particular topic, and is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the particular topic.

There are many variations, but typically, someone who wants to organize a carnival posts details of the theme or topic to their blog, and asks readers to submit relevant articles for inclusion in an upcoming edition. The host then collects links to these submissions, edits and annotates them (often in very creative ways), and publishes the resulting round-up to his or her blog. (From Wikiepdia)

Many carnivals have a home page or principal organizer, who lines up guest bloggers to host each edition. This means that the carnival travels, appearing on a different blog each time.

Two Blog carnival may be of interest for the readers of this blog:

Encephalon , a neuroscience blog carnival; the 28the edition is hosted by the Bohemian Scientist; the next issue will be published (August 13) at Memoirs of a Postgrad

The Philosophers' Carnival. The 51st edition is hosted by Enigmania. The next edition will be presented by Philosophy, etc. (August 27).

Enjoy !

(other blog carnivals are listed here)

7/19/07

The Top 10 Most Important Papers in Neuroeconomics

The choice wasn't easy, and I may be influenced by my research interests, but here is what I think are the most important papers in the field:

Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., & Prelec, D. (2005). Neuroeconomics: How neuroscience can inform economics. Journal of Economic Literature, 43(1), 9-64.

Written by famous behavioral economists, this extensive review paper suggests how economics can be theoretically and empirically informed by neuroeconomics.

Glimcher, P. W., & Rustichini, A. (2004). Neuroeconomics: The Consilience of Brain and Decision. Science, 306(5695), 447-452.

An analysis of the theoretical relationship between biology, economics, neuroscience and psychology.

Sanfey, A. G., Rilling, J. K., Aronson, J. A., Nystrom, L. E., & Cohen, J. D. (2003). The neural basis of economic decision-making in the Ultimatum Game. Science, 300(5626), 1755-1758.

Famous paper showing that unfair offers elicit activity in the anterior insula, an area associated with disgust (but not when they interact with a computer).

Zak, P. J. (2004). Neuroeconomics. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci, 359(1451), 1737-1748.

A review paper that provides a complete introduction to neuroscience (methods, brain functions, etc.) and neuroeconomics.

Kosfeld, M., Heinrichs, M., Zak, P. J., Fischbacher, U., & Fehr, E. (2005). Oxytocin increases trust in humans. Nature, 435(7042), 673-676.

Subjects who received oxytocin via nasal spray are more trusting.

Rilling, J., Gutman, D., Zeh, T., Pagnoni, G., Berns, G., & Kilts, C. (2002). A neural basis for social cooperation. Neuron, 35(2), 395-405.

Players who initiate and players who experiment mutual cooperation display activation in nucleus accumbens and other reward-related areas.

de Quervain, D. J., Fischbacher, U., Treyer, V., Schellhammer, M., Schnyder, U., Buck, A., et al. (2004). The neural basis of altruistic punishment. Science, 305(5688), 1254-1258.

Punishing cheaters, in the trust game, activates the nucleus accumbens, a subcortical structure involved in pleasure.

Montague, P. R., & Berns, G. S. (2002). Neural Economics and the Biological Substrates of Valuation. Neuron, 36(2), 265-284.

One of the first application of utility theory to dopaminergic systems.

McCabe, K., Houser, D., Ryan, L., Smith, V., & Trouard, T. (2001). A functional imaging study of cooperation in two-person reciprocal exchange. PNAS, 98(20), 11832-11835.

The first imaging study in game theory. Decision-makers are more likely to cooperate with real humans than with computers and cooperators have a significantly different brain activation in the two conditions.

Platt, M. L., & Glimcher, P. W. (1999). Neural correlates of decision variables in parietal cortex. Nature, 400(6741), 238.

The first genuine neuroeconomics paper. Lateral intraparietal area (LIP) activity predicts visual-saccadic decision-making, encode the desirabilities of making particular movements.

My critera are citations, influence, historical/theoretical importance and relevance for understanding decision-making

5/28/07

Science Direct RSS feeds

Science direct, the well-known Internet portal of Elsevier, features now RSS feeds for all its journals (8.5 million articles from over 2000 journals). Really useful for keeping up-to-date. Although I must say that I am a big fan of Scopus (15,000 journals). The thing is that Scopus is a search engine, not a directory of journals. So they are both useful for the online researcher.

4/12/07