Studying Embodied Decisions in the Wild and in the Lab

Abstract

During real-life decisions, such as when we drive on a busy road or play soccer with friends, we continuously select between different action possibilities, or affordances, considering not only their potential immediate payoffs but also the new opportunities that they may make possible in the future. If our brains have evolved to successfully make such embodied decisions, requiring trade-offs between present and future affordances, then understanding their dynamics is of fundamental importance. However, studying embodied decisions in the wild is notoriously challenging, given that real-life scenarios involve multiple interacting factors that are difficult to measure, manipulate, and model. Studying embodied decisions in the lab is challenging, too, as embodied tasks differ significantly from classical decision settings such as (economic) decisions between fixed sets of monetary outcomes. In this chapter, we discuss some mathematical and methodological advancements in the study of embodied decisions in the wild and in the lab, which can pave the way to more systematic efforts to understand this important but still poorly understood ability.