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Workshop 7: Systems Biology of Decision Making (June 16-20, 2008)

Organizers: Kevin Passino, Thomas Waite, Roger Ratcliff, Thomas Seeley, Nigel Franks, and Naomi Leonard

Experimental biology is uncovering the mechanisms supporting decision-making in individual animals (e.g., in monkeys) and social animal groups (e.g., bees and ants). Multiscale mathematical models are being developed and validated for several species, including those for the (i) neuron-to-behavioral levels in cognitive neuroscience (e.g., diffusion or decision field theory models), (ii) organism-to-group levels for social insects (e.g., differential equations and individual-oriented models), and (iii) individual/group-to-ecological levels in behavioral ecology (e.g., optimization or evolutionary game-theoretic models). Several of these models and species share common features; hence there exists significant opportunities for cross-fertilization and progress toward an understanding mechanisms and whole-system emergent properties. Mathematical, statistical, and computational analyses are being to used to study (i) properties of the dynamics of decision making (e.g., feedback mechanisms, coupling, stability, and speed-accuracy trade-offs), (ii) cross-scale effects (e.g., impact of massively parallel mechanisms at one level on emergence of choice discrimination or distractor elimination abilities at a higher level), (iii) effects of context (e.g., similarity and attractivity effects), and (iv) Darwinian evolution of robustness or reliability in the presence of uncertainty (e.g., isolated failures at one level and environmental variations). The goal of this workshop is to facilitate the development of an integrated "systems biology" of decision-making processes that spans multiple spatio-temporal scales and levels of biological organization, and accounts for the perspectives of biologists, psychologists, economists, mathematicians, and engineers.