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In many tasks, such as mazes or social interactions, effective decision making typically requires enumerating the expected outcomes of candidate actions over a series of subsequent events. Because of the computational complexity of such evaluation, it is believed that human and animal brains use a range of shortcuts to simplify or approximate it. I review behavioral and neural evidence that humans rationally trade off exact and approximate evaluation in such sequential decision making. This research offers a new perspective on healthy behaviors, like habits, and pathological ones, like compulsion, which are both viewed as approximate evaluations that fail to incorporate experiences relevant to a decision and instead rely on inappropriate or out-of-date evaluations. I also present new theoretical and experimental work that aims to address the positive counterpart to such neglect: which particular events are considered, in which circumstances, to support choice. This brings the reach of the framework to many new phenomena, including pre-computation for future choices, nonlocal activity in the hippocampal place system, consolidation during sleep, and a new range of disordered symptoms such as craving, hallucinations, and rumination.

TBA

A few nanometer thin interface which is formed between the metal and the organic structure controls bonding strength, stability and charge transfer between these two quite different types of materials. To understand and optimize formation of that interface at the nanoscale we used Self-Assembled Monolayers (SAMs) which are considered a model system for the analysis of the interaction of organic molecules with the metal substrate. In this presentation we will focus on application of a new experimental approach based on ion beam-induced desorption which we used to address this problem demonstrating for the first time the effect of oscillations in stability of consecutive chemical bonds at the molecule-metal interface. As a next step we will analyze the consequence of this effect for the thermal stability of a model SAM systems and, finally, we will discuss how this effect can contribute to the charge transport at the molecule-metal interface