Decision neuroscience

Organisms must act in the face of sensory, motor, and reward uncertainty stemming from a pandemonium of stochasticity and missing information. In many tasks, organisms can make better decisions if they have at their disposal a representation of the uncertainty associated with task-relevant variables. We formalize this problem using Bayesian decision theory and review recent behavioral and neural evidence that the brain may use knowledge of uncertainty, confidence, and probability.

The manifold symptoms of depression are common and often transient features of healthy life that are likely to be adaptive in difficult circumstances. It is when these symptoms enter a seemingly self-propelling spiral that the maladaptive features of a disorder emerge. We examine this malignant transformation from the perspective of the computational neuroscience of decision making, investigating how dysfunction of the brain's mechanisms of evaluation might lie at its heart. We start by considering the behavioral implications of pessimistic evaluations of decision variables...

The basal ganglia are equipped with inhibitory and disinhibitory mechanisms that enable a subject to choose valuable objects and actions. Notably, a value can be determined flexibly by recent experience or stably by prolonged experience. Recent studies have revealed that the head and tail of the caudate nucleus selectively and differentially process flexible and stable values of visual objects. These signals are sent to the superior colliculus through different parts of the substantia nigra so that the animal looks preferentially at high-valued objects, but in different manners...

Mood disorders are common and debilitating conditions characterized in part by profound deficits in reward-related behavioural domains. A recent literature has identified important structural and functional alterations within the brain's reward circuitry--particularly in the ventral tegmental area-nucleus accumbens pathway--that are associated with symptoms such as anhedonia and aberrant reward-associated perception and memory. This Review synthesizes recent data from human and rodent studies from which emerges a circuit-level framework for understanding reward deficits in depression...

Recent concepts of addiction to drugs (e.g. cocaine) and non-drugs (e.g. gambling) have proposed that these behaviors are the product of an imbalance between three separate, but interacting, neural systems: an impulsive, largely amygdala-striatum dependent, neural system that promotes automatic, habitual and salient behaviors; a reflective, mainly prefrontal cortex dependent, neural system for decision-making, forecasting the future consequences of a behavior, and inhibitory control; and the insula that integrates interoception states into conscious feelings and into decision-making processes that are involved in uncertain risk and reward...

As the global population ages, older decision makers will be required to take greater responsibility for their own physical, psychological and financial well-being. With this in mind, researchers have begun to examine the effects of ageing on decision making and associated neural circuits. A new 'affect-integration-motivation' (AIM) framework may help to clarify how affective and motivational circuits support decision making. Recent research has shed light on whether and how ageing influences these circuits, providing an interdisciplinary account of how ageing can alter decision making...