When we make decisions in everyday life, we need to take into account multiple facts. For example, when choosing a new restaurant we need to consider whether we like a particular type of cuisine, what references we have about it, how expensive it may be, etc. This information representation extends until after well after the decision is made – for example, after the meal is complete, we evaluate its quality and whether we would consider coming back to the same restaurant. Despite this, we are capable of making decisions quickly and relatively effortlessly, which raises the questions of how the brain can process these distinct types of information in parallel and make decisions which can be sometimes very fast – we can make choices in a split second. A new article in Current Biology from CNSR member Ignacio Saez highlights how the brain is capable of carrying out this complex behavior.
In it, we used an innovative approach to study brain activity during decision-making. Leveraging clinical interventions for the treatment of epilepsy that involve the placement of electrodes in the brain of patient volunteers, we recorded the electrical activity of the patients’ brain while they make uncertain choices. We focused on the orbitofrontal cortex (so called because of its location right above the eye orbits), a part of the frontal brain known to be important for decision-making and flexible thought that is difficult to study because of its deep location within the brain. While we recorded their brain activity, patients played a simple gambling game in which they chose whether to bet on a roulette-type game.
Strikingly, we found that regret signals could be pervasive in the brain, and regret from a bad outcome could extend into the following choice, indicating that patients lingered in their mistakes even when these did not help with new choices. This research thus has implications beyond our understanding of the neural basis of choice, and could be important to understand the emotional impact of our errors.
Comments are closed.