Decision Making and the Brain, Elsevier, in preparation. Corresponding Author:

Abstract

Acknowledgments: We thank Paul Glimcher for his comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Emmy-Noether-Programme; grant TR 528/1-3) and the National Institutes of Health (grant EY08266). Our survival depends on our ability to act effectively, maximizing the chances that we achieve our movement goals. In the course of a day we make many movements, each of which can be carried out in a variety of ways. Shall I reach for that wine glass quickly or slowly? Approach from the right or left? Movement planning is a form of decision making as we choose one of many possible movement strategies to accomplish any given movement goal. It is important for us to make these “motor decisions ” rapidly and well. In this chapter, we consider how movements are planned and show that a certain class of movement-planning problems is mathematically equivalent to a choice among lotteries in decision-making under risk or ambiguity (see also Trommershäuser et al., 2006a). This analogy allows us to examine movement planning from a new perspective, that of the ideal economic movement planner. It also allows us to contrast how we make decisions in two very different modalities, planning of movement and traditional economic decision making