Welcome

🏠 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 the 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.

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.

Registration and abstract submission

The conference attracted a lot of interest and we have reached earlier than expected the maximal number of attendees allowed by our security services. We had to close registration, so we apologize to those who were planning to register later on. If you want to be added to the waiting list for in person attendance, and/or receive a zoom link for attending the talks remotely, please send an email to sbdm2026@gmail.com.

Abstract submission is now closed.

Satellite event

The day before SBDM, some of our colleagues are organising a half-day seminar, Cognitive Science for Climate Change, taking place on Tuesday 26 May 2026 at École Normale Supérieure, Paris. More information and registration: Eventbrite.

Scientific programme and abstracts

Poster assignments have been released. Your poster number and session are indicated in the poster abstract booklet.
Posters
Poster abstract booklet

Compiled volume of all accepted poster abstracts. Posters are expected to be A0, vertical.

Programme
Programme and speaker abstracts

Complete symposium schedule, including abstracts of invited presentations.

Detailed schedule

Wednesday, May 27 - 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: Mathias Pessiglione

  • 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, Rome, Italy):
    "Bridging task-level and spatial cognitive maps for goal-directed navigation"

16h00 - 17h30 - Poster session 1

17h30 - 19h00 - Poster session 2

Thursday, May 28 - 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 (École 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 (Centre for Neuroscience Research of Lyon, France):
    "Probing serotonergic mechanisms of controllability estimation across species"
  • 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):
    "Ultrasound neuromodulation of human deep brain circuits in affective and effort-based decision-making"
  • 15h30 - 16h00: Alice Hodapp (NeuroSpin / INM, France):
    "Neuromodulation, learning, and the topography of brain activity"

16h00 - 17h30 - Poster session 3

17h30 - 19h00 - Poster session 4

19h30 - 22h00 - Social event

Buffet dinner at Les Caves D'Esclangon, Jussieu

Friday, May 29 - Paris Brain Institute, Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital

9h30 - 12h00 - Talk session 5

Intrinsic motivation and decision making - Chair: Alizée Lopez-Persem

  • 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) / Mathias Pessiglione (Paris Brain Institute, France):
    "Improving performance without effort: a dissociation between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation"
  • 12h00 - 12h30: Lieke van Lieshout (Donders Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands):
    "Autonomy as a Context-Dependent Motivational Mechanism for Learning"

12h30 - 14h00 - Lunch break

14h00 - 16h30 - Talk session 6

Emotions related to decision making - Chair: Julie Grèzes

  • 14h00 - 14h30: Agnes Moors (KU 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
Loading... Loading...