Adam Smith Business School

Professor Chew Soo Hong (National University of Singapore (NUS))

Intelligence, Situation Awareness, and Context Sensitive Choice: From Brain Plasticity to Consciousness to Incentive
Tuesday, 14 October 2025, 16:00–17:30
Room 282 Hothouse, Adam Smith Business School

Abstract

Intelligence refers to the ability to perceive situations in general and make decisions towards accomplishing goals. In The Principles of Psychology, James (1890) describes consciousness as a “stream” – a continuous, dynamic process that facilitates the perception of the environment. In Why Consciousness, Aumann (2024) argues that such experiential consciousness evolved to enable the experience of incentives, which underpins goal seeking behavior such as preference maximization implicit in economic decision making. Aumann leaves open the question of “How” which we address by relying on brain plasticity at the synaptic level. We hypothesize that the experience of incentive emerges from the modulation of synaptic plasticity respectively by the gain and loss oriented neurochemicals of dopamine and serotonin. In tandem with another pair of neurochemicals, acetylcholine and norepinephrine which modulate attention and salience respectively, we arrive at a neurochemical model of context sensitive choice which is inherently reference-dependent and encompasses a rich range of choice phenomena.

Biography

Professor Soo Hong Chew is Professor and Provost Chair at the National University of Singapore, where he co-directs the Laboratory for Behavioral × Biological Economics and the Social Sciences. He obtained his PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia in 1981 and has previously held academic positions at the University of Arizona, Johns Hopkins University, the University of California Irvine, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, where he directed the Centre for Experimental Business Research. A Fellow of the Econometric Society, Professor Chew’s research spans decision theory, behavioural economics, biological economics, and experimental economics.

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First published: 9 October 2025