Conference – Decision in Context: Neural Bases of Flexible Decision-Making

A girl who has to make a decision
  • picto date28/08/2025
  • picto placeTechnopole, Swiss Digital Center, salle Maïa, Sierre
  • picto heure14:00 - 15:00

This conference is part of the Decoding Imagination: Reading the mind’s eye project, funded by The Sense, which explores the decoding of brain signals and decision-making mechanisms. The project involves collaboration between the Pain & Interoception Unit (Prof. Chantal Berna Renella, University of Lausanne/CHUV) and the Knowledge Management & Data Streams Unit (Prof. Jean-Paul Calbimonte, HES-SO Valais-Wallis).

Dr. Pinar Goktepe, postdoctoral researcher at ATR Kyoto, will present her work on how context influences decision-making, combining experimental approaches and machine learning methods. She is collaborating with Prof. Jean-Paul Calbimonte’s lab as an external contributor for this talk, sharing her expertise and insights, but her research at ATR Kyoto is independent and funded through other sources.

Summary

Context plays a central, though often overlooked, role in how we make decisions. It conveys information that can profoundly alter the outcome of a choice.

In this presentation, two complementary studies examine how context guides different stages of decision-making:

  • The first uses EEG and multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) to study how context shapes deliberation.
  • The second combines fMRI and MVPA to examine context-dependent perceptual decisions and determine at which stage of decision-making context is integrated: does it already influence sensory processing, and if so, how?

Biography

Dr. Pinar Goktepe is a postdoctoral researcher at the Computational Neuroscience Laboratories of the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) in Kyoto, Japan.

She obtained her PhD in neuroscience at the University of Bern, where she worked on decoding brain states and decisions from EEG signals. Her current research focuses on the neural bases of decision-making and the development of machine learning methods applied to brain activity decoding. She collaborates with Prof. Jean-Paul Calbimonte’s laboratory within the Decoding Imagination project, supported by The Sense.

Practical Information

  • Conference in English
  • Free admission, by registration
  • Access in person (Sierre) and online (Zoom)