Marco Vasconcelos

Marco Vasconcelos’s main stream of research deals with decision making and rationality. He integrates concepts and techniques from operant and developmental psychology and comparative cognition research with normative theoretical models from optimal foraging theory and microeconomics. To understand the thread of his research it is necessary to define decision making. Decisions are not a subclass of behavior but a way to investigate it; all behavior can be described as choice. In practice, however, researchers deal with preferences between alternatives modeling how they are valued and how valuation drives choices. He uses optimality and learning theory to deal with valuation, and empirically supported algorithms to translate valuation into choice. Marco endeavors to develop a model of the causative process under investigation, if possible in mathematical language, and then test it by experiment.