Completed Psychology & Behaviour Economics & Business

Decision making in an unstable world

Funder EPSRC (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation University of Bristol
Funding £1.6M
Period Sept 2011 — Mar 2016

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A human volunteer sits at a computer screen, making rapid choices as the rules of the game shift without warning—and researchers are watching to decode how the brain adapts to a world that refuses to stay still. This matters because most decision-making models assume a stable environment, where past experience reliably predicts future outcomes. In reality, financial markets crash, traffic patterns jam, and natural disasters unfold in ways no historical data can fully anticipate. Humans handle this instability reasonably well, but the underlying cognitive and computational mechanisms remain poorly understood. The project assembles a cross-disciplinary team—from mathematics and computer science to neurology and geography—to run controlled experiments on human volunteers and build mathematical models of how decisions are made under uncertainty. If successful, these models could directly improve artificial decision-making systems that operate in volatile conditions: computer-controlled traffic flow, automated stock trading, and early warning systems for disasters. The research also tackles a practical challenge in fields like food choice, addiction, and financial behaviour. Because the work is fundamentally curiosity-driven, it may yield unexpected breakthroughs in how we design machines that learn and adapt as flexibly as humans do.

View original technical description
For humans and machines decision making is not always simple. Sometimes the world changes so quickly that experience does not always tell you how to behave. Humans can cope reasonably well in this unstable and complicated world but we don't have a full understanding of how they do this. Solving this problem requires a wide range of researchers from very different backgrounds to work together. This grant assembles a team from Mathematics, Statistics, Computer Science, Psychology, Economics, Earth Sciences, Geography, Neurology, Education and Biology.We will carry out experiments on human volunteers while they make decisions and try to understand how these decisions are made. The resulting models will then be useful in the design of artificial decision making systems such as computer based traffic flow systems, automatic stock market trading systems and early warning systems for disasters. This project also includes a number of researchers who work on real world problems such as food choice, financial decision making, disaster management and human addiction.A major challenge in this area is to build genuine understanding and common working practices across the subjects. We have planned a range of activities to help build a common language and understanding which will result in a new and sustainable community of decision making researchers.

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Researchers

Casimir Ludwig (Co-Investigator)David Leslie (Co-Investigator)Iain Gilchrist (Principal Investigator)John McNamara (Co-Investigator)Rafal Bogacz (Co-Investigator)Roland Baddeley (Co-Investigator)Simon Farrell (Co-Investigator)

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Original classification

Research Grant

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