Summary
So far, the field of decision neuroscience reflects a particular merging of disciplines: It integrates concepts from economics and cognitive psychology with the research methods of neuroscience. This combination has not only shaped understanding of the neural mechanisms that underlie decision making, it has influenced how researchers approach problems throughout the cognitive neurosciences – as one of many examples, consider recent work on the interactions between reward and memory (Adcock et al., 2006; Axmacher et al., 2010; Han et al., 2010).
Yet, fundamental problems remain. Some will be resolved over the coming years through new analysis techniques, novel experimental tasks, or the accumulation of new data. Other, more difficult problems may not be addressable using the methods typical to current studies. They require, instead, a reversal of the traditional approach – changing to one that integrates research methods from economics and psychology (e.g., econometrics, psychometric analyses) with conceptual models from neuroscience (e.g., topographic functional maps, computational biology). In doing so, decision neuroscience can extend the progress it has made in understanding value to the full range of choice phenomena.