Keynote Speaker:
Professor Chew Soo Hong serves as the Director of the Center for Wisdom Economy at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics and holds the position of Chair Professor in the Department of Economics at the National University of Singapore. He is recognized as a Fellow of both the Econometric Society and the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), and is an internationally leading scholar in behavioral and experimental economics. Professor Chew graduated from the University of British Columbia in 1981. He has published numerous papers in top-tier international economics journals, including Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of the European Economic Association, Journal of Economic Theory, Management Science, and International Economic Review. Additionally, he has contributed extensively to prominent journals in the biological sciences, such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Neuron, Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B, *Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Neuroimage.
Main Content:
Intelligence refers to the ability to perceive situations in general, acting appropriately, deciding among perceived options, towards accomplishing goals (Chew and Ebstein, 2025). In The Principles of Psychology, William James (1890) describes consciousness as a“stream", a continuous, dynamic process that facilitates the perception of the environment. In Why Consciousness, Robert Aumann (2024) argues that consciousness evolved to enable the experience of incentive, underpinning goal seeking behavior such as preference maximization implicit in economic decision making. Auman 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. We further associate the attention function in Attention Weighted Utility (AWU–Chew, 1983; Chew, Wang, Zhong, 2025) with the pair of neurochemicals–acetylcholine and norepinephrine–modulating top-down attention and bottom-up salience respectively. This delivers a neurobiological foundation for AWU, which is being applied to model context sensitive choice arising from changing as well as increasing awareness (Karni, Viero, 2013).
Time：
January 9, 2026 (Friday), 15:45
Venue：
Coffee Beanery
Organizer:
Advanced Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences (AI-HSS)
