Dr. Yang Hu (Institute for Cognitive Science (ISC) - Marc Jeannerod, CNRS Lyon, FR)

Neuro-computational Bases of (Im)morality

March 7, 2019 | 5 pm

 

Morality describes what is the “right” and “wrong” way to behave and usually concerns the trade-off between personal profit and other’s welfare, which has been the core topic in the field of philosophy, ethics, and psychology. One fundamental question still puzzling us is how our brain enables (im)morality. The rapid development of the brain imaging technique (esp., fMRI) greatly improves our understanding of the neural basis of (im)morality. However, early studies, which usually take hypothetical ethical dilemmas as the stimuli, are confronted with the problems of context reality (or decision consequence). Moreover, they can hardly provide a mechanistic account for moral behaviors. These drawbacks could be fairly addressed by adopting novel paradigms eliciting incentivized decisions and taking the computational modelling approach. In this talk, I will present my recent fMRI studies on three different but relevant topics (i.e., corruption, flexible immorality, and altered (im)morality in ASD patients), which investigate the neuro-computational bases of (im)morality by adopting with novel task paradigms together with the state-of-art computational modelling.

Organiser:
Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods (SCAN unit)
Location:
Faculty of Psychology (Lecture hall G, 2nd floor, left wing)