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Evaluation of Probabilities and Brain Activity - An EEG-Study

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Brain Informatics (BI 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 5819))

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Abstract

This paper focuses on the problem of probability weighting in the evaluation of lotteries. According to Prospect Theory a probability of 0.5 has a weight of smaller than 0.5. We conduct an EEG experiment in which we compare the results of the evaluation of binary lotteries by certainty equivalents with the results of the bisection method. The bisection method gives the amount of money that corresponds to the midpoint of the utilities of the two payoffs in a binary lottery as it has been shown previously. In this method probabilities are not evaluated. We analyzed EEG data focused on whether a probability is evaluated or not. Our data show differences between the two methods connected with the attention towards sure monetary payoffs, but they do not show brain activity connected with a devaluation of the probability of 0.5.

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Morgenstern, R., Heldmann, M., Münte, T., Vogt, B. (2009). Evaluation of Probabilities and Brain Activity - An EEG-Study. In: Zhong, N., Li, K., Lu, S., Chen, L. (eds) Brain Informatics. BI 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 5819. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04954-5_18

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04954-5_18

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-04953-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-04954-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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