Keynote Speaker
Saturday, October 10, 2026 16:00-17:00
Carlos Brody
Princeton University
Workshop
Workshop 1: Social & Decision Sciences Workshop
Friday, October 9, 2026 9:00-10:00am
Cary Frydman
University of Southern California
Cary Frydman is an associate professor of finance and business economics at the USC Marshall School of Business. His research is interdisciplinary, drawing on principles from psychology and neuroscience to answer questions in finance and economics. He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and currently serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Finance and Journal of Financial Economics. His most recent line of research investigates the role of cognitive imprecision in economic decision-making.
Abstract
Cognitive Noise and Economic Decisions
A growing body of work in economics proposes that agents base their decisions on noisy, imprecise representations of the environment. This inherent cognitive noise helps explain anomalies in perceptual decisions, risky choice, and belief updating. The talk will begin with a brief overview of this literature and then turn to three economic applications in the areas of finance, judgment and decision-making, and game theory. The overarching theme is that modeling behavior based on an imprecise representation of the environment can help social scientists better predict individual economic decisions as well as strategic interactions.
Workshop
Workshop 2: NeuroScience Workshop
Friday, October 9, 2026 10:00-11:00am
Daniela Schiller
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Dr. Daniela Schiller is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her lab focuses on emotional memory and social cognition. Her research has elucidated the neural computations underlying threat learning, how the brain modifies emotional memories, and how affective states and social relationships are dynamically tracked. Schiller is a Fulbright Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and has received numerous awards, including the New York Academy of Sciences’ Blavatnik Award and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in Neuroscience.
Abstract
Abstracting Trauma, Time, and Space: A Neural Architecture of Experience
The stability of affective states, and the flexible transition between them, are a hallmark of wellbeing. How does the brain represent, track, and shift between affective states? The talk will describe a series of studies investigating naturalistic processes of real-life traumatic memories, time tagging of episodic events, and social interactions. A common thread across these studies is the role of the hippocampus in differentiating sad from traumatic memories, tagging present versus temporally removed events, and cognitive mapping. We examine these processes in individuals with PTSD and healthy volunteers, using ultra-high 7T neuroimaging, as well as intracranial recordings in the human brain. This line of research underpins the role of the hippocampus in systematically organizing memories to navigate life.