Welcome

The Thirteenth Symposium on Biology of Decision Making (SBDM 2026) will take place in Paris on May 27-29, 2026, at the Paris Brain Institute (Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital) and NeuroModulation Institute (Sainte-Anne Hospital).

The objective of this three-day symposium is to gather people from different research fields with different approaches (philosophy, cognition, economics, ethology, psychiatry, robotics, neural and computational approaches) to decision making.

The conference is now full. If you want to be added to the waiting-list, please send an email to sbdm2026@gmail.com

Abstract submission is now closed.

 

Given the ongoing climate crisis, for this 2026 edition, we have decided to create a symposium maximising the possibility for invited speakers to travel by train or a short flight. We are nevertheless happy to host attendees from any place in the world. As we are aware of the tension between reducing carbon footprint and maintaining a diversity of countries, our model for SBDM may be reconsidered in next editions. The hope is to strike a right balance between sustainability and inclusivity across the years.

 

Poster Abstract Booklet

 

WEDNESDAY, MAY 27TH - Paris Brain Institute, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital

 

9h30 - 12h00 – Talk Session 1

Metacognition of decision making – Chair: Marion Rouault

  • 9h00 - 9h30: Coffee + Welcoming words

  • 9h30 - 10h00: Maël Lebreton (Paris School of Economics, France): 
    "How Incentive Motivation Shapes and Biases Metacognitive Judgments"

  • 10h00 - 10h30: Annika Boldt (University College London, UK):
    "How disconfirmatory evidence shapes decision confidence"

  • 10h30 - 11h00: Michael Pereira (Grenoble Institut des Neurosciences, France):
    "Computational mechanisms of perceptual confidence"

  • 11h00 - 11h30: Coffee break

  • 11h30 - 12h00: Elisabeth Parés-Pujolràs (University College Dublin, Ireland):
    "Neural correlates of adaptive decision-making in changing environments"

  • 12h00 - 12h30: Tricia Seow (University College London, UK):
    "A Unified Framework for Metacognition in Psychiatry"


12h30 - 13h30 – Lunch break 

 

13h30 - 16h00 – Talk Session 2 

Theoretical models of decision-making – Chair: Alizée Lopez-Persem 

  • 13h30 - 14h00: Clay Holroyd (Ghent University, Belgium):
    "Energetic Constraints on Decision Making"

  • 14h00 - 14h30: Béatrice Boulu-Reshef (Cergy Paris Université, France):
    "Double-sided opportunism in infrastructure investment: Theory and experiment"

  • 14h30 - 15h00: Coffee break

  • 15h00 - 15h30: Juliette Bénon (University of Zurich, Switzerland):
    "Biological profits of irrational computations in the orbitofrontal cortex"

  • 15h30 - 16h00: Giovanni Pezzulo (National Research Council of Italy, Roma): TBA

 

16h00 - 17h30 - Poster Session 1

17h30 - 19h00 - Poster Session 2

 

 

THURSDAY, MAY 28TH - NeuroModulation Institute, Sainte-Anne Hospital

 

9h30 - 12h00 – Talk Session 3

Hidden internal states in decision making – Chair: Florent Meyniel 

  • 9h00 - 9h30: Coffee + Welcoming words

  • 9h30 - 10h00: Athena Akrami (University College London, UK):
    "Cross-species study of statistical learning – from behaviour to mechanism"

  • 10h00 - 10h30: Diksha Gupta (University College London, UK):
    "An explanatory link between history biases and lapses"

  • 10h30 - 11h00: Simon van Gaal (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands):
    "Adaptive arousal regulation: How ongoing fluctuations in pupil-linked arousal shape task performance"

  • 11h00 - 11h30: Coffee break

  • 11h30 - 12h00: Anne Urai (Leiden University, Netherlands):
    "Structure uncovered: understanding temporal  variability in perceptual decision-making"

  • 12h00 - 12h30: Valentin Wyart (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France):
    "Constraint and advantage: the two faces of noise in decision-making under uncertainty"

 

12h30 - 13h30 – Lunch break 

 

13h30 - 16h00 – Talk Session 4

Monoaminergic control of decision making – Chair: Lucie Berkovitch 

  • 13h30 - 14h00: Romain Ligneul (Center for Neuroscience Research of Lyon, France): TBA

  • 14h00 - 14h30: Dan Bang (Aarhus University, Denmark):
    "Fast dopamine dynamics in the conscious human brain during Pavlovian-instrumental conflict and risky behaviour"

  • 14h30 - 15h00: Coffee break

  • 15h00 - 15h30: Miriam Klein-Flügge (University of Oxford, UK): TBA

  • 15h30 - 16h00: Alice Hodapp (NeuroSpin / INM, France): TBA

 

16h00 - 17h30 - Poster Session 3

17h30 - 19h00 - Poster Session 4

 

19h30-22h00 – Social event

Buffet dinner at the Zamansky tower, Jussieu 

 

 

FRIDAY, MAY 29TH - Paris Brain Institute, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital

 

9h30 - 12h00 – Talk Session 5

Intrinsic motivation and decision making  – Chair: Mathias Pessiglione 

  • 9h00 - 9h30: Coffee + Welcoming words

  • 9h30 - 10h00: Kou Murayama (University of Tübingen, Germany):
    "From momentary decision-making to sustained sense-making: Reward-learning framework of knowledge acquisition"

  • 10h00 - 10h30: Irene Cogliati Dezza (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium):
    "From phone notifications to browsing social media: how reinforcement learning may explain digital information consumption"

  • 10h30 - 11h00: Ellen O'Donoghue (Cardiff University, UK):
    "Disentangling the Influences of Curiosity and Active Exploration on Spatial Memory"

  • 11h00 - 11h30: Coffee break

  • 11h30 - 12h00: Jade Seguin (University of Geneva, Switzerland): TBA

  • 12h00 - 12h30: Lieke van Lieshout (Donders Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands):
    "Exploring the Impact of Curiosity and Extrinsic Rewards on Information Seeking and Memory"

 

12h30 - 14h – Lunch break 

 

14h00 - 16h30 – Talk Session 6

Emotions related to decision making – Chair: Julie Grèzes

  • 14h00 - 14h30: Agnes Moors (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium):
    "Emotions as high-impact decisions: A goal-directed theory of behavior and affect"

  • 14h30 - 15h00: Stéphane Lemaire (University of Rennes, France):
    "In what sense moods represent future prospects? A layered account and its cognitive consequence on decision making"

  • 15h00 - 15h30: Coffee break

  • 15h30 - 16h00: Roeland Heerema (Paris Brain Institute, France):
    "Mood fluctuations shift economic cost-benefit trade-offs"

  • 16h00 - 16h30: Camilla Nord (University of Cambridge, UK):
    "Parallel influences of mental health and bodily signals on decision-making"

 

Cautionary note: the order of talks and sessions is still subject to change.

 contact: sbdm2026@gmail.com

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