No abstract

Unconscious neural activity has been repeatedly shown to precede and potentially even influence subsequent free decisions. However, to date, such findings have been mostly restricted to simple motor choices, and despite considerable debate, there is no evidence that the outcome of more complex free decisions can be predicted from prior brain signals. Here, we show that the outcome of a free decision to either add or subtract numbers can already be decoded from neural activity in medial prefrontal and parietal cortex 4 s before the participant reports they are consciously making their choice. These choice-predictive signals co-occurred with the so-called default mode brain activity pattern that was still dominant at the time when the choice-predictive signals occurred. Our results suggest that unconscious preparation of free choices is not restricted to motor preparation. Instead, decisions at multiple scales of abstraction evolve from the dynamics of preceding brain activity.T he subjective experience that our voluntary actions are initiated in the conscious mind has been challenged by the finding that the human brain may already start shaping spontaneous decisions even before they enter into conscious awareness (1, 2). Specifically, the human brain can start preparing spontaneous movements up to several seconds before a person believes themselves to be consciously making a decision to move (1-3).To date, such early choice-predictive signals have only been investigated for simple movement decisions (1-6). However, there are several reasons to assess whether preparatory processes also occur for higher-level, more abstract types of decisions. First, the relevance of motor decisions for understanding the neural formation and preparation of intentions has been heavily debated (7,8), mainly because of their reduced complexity (9, 10) and the limited levels of awareness in motor control (11,12). Second, previous studies on predictive signals for motor choices have revealed early information in prefrontal and parietal brain regions. These regions are not generally considered "motor," but they have been sporadically observed in motor preparation (13,14). This invites the question of whether these regions provide only unconscious preparation of motor intentions or a common, task-independent network for preparing multiple types of decisions before awareness. Given the fundamentally different neural processes involved in performing motor acts and mental calculations, identifying overlap between the early choice-predictive signals would be of high relevance because it would point toward a common cerebral starting point for different types of choices.We also aimed to address another question regarding the prediction of free choices. Previous studies (2, 4) have found early choice-predictive information in areas that overlap with the so-called "default mode" network (DMN) (15)(16)(17). For this reason, we also directly investigated the link between our choice-predictive signals and these "off-task" brain signals. Interestingl...

Imagine you are standing at a street with heavy traffic watching someone on the other side of the road. Do you think your brain is implicitly registering your willingness to buy any of the cars passing by outside your focus of attention? To address this question, we measured brain responses to consumer products (cars) in two experimental groups using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants in the first group (high attention) were instructed to closely attend to the products and to rate their attractiveness. Participants in the second group (low attention) were distracted from products and their attention was directed elsewhere. After scanning, participants were asked to state their willingness to buy each product. During the acquisition of neural data, participants were not aware that consumer choices regarding these cars would subsequently be required. Multivariate decoding was then applied to assess the choice-related predictive information encoded in the brain during product exposure in both conditions. Distributed activation patterns in the insula and the medial prefrontal cortex were found to reliably encode subsequent choices in both the high and the low attention group. Importantly, consumer choices could be predicted equally well in the low attention as in the high attention group. This suggests that neural evaluation of products and associated choice-related processing does not necessarily depend on attentional processing of available items. Overall, the present findings emphasize the potential of implicit, automatic processes in guiding even important and complex decisions.

In a dynamic world, an accurate model of the environment is vital for survival, and agents ought regularly to seek out new information with which to update their world models. This aspect of behaviour is not captured well by classical theories of decision making, and the cognitive mechanisms of information seeking are poorly understood. In particular, it is not known whether information is valued only for its instrumental use, or whether humans also assign it a non-instrumental intrinsic value. To address this question, the present study assessed preference for non-instrumental information among 80 healthy participants in two experiments. Participants performed a novel information preference task in which they could choose to pay a monetary cost to receive advance information about the outcome of a monetary lottery. Importantly, acquiring information did not alter lottery outcome probabilities. We found that participants were willing to incur considerable monetary costs to acquire payoff-irrelevant information about the lottery outcome. This behaviour was well explained by a computational cognitive model in which information preference resulted from aversion to temporally prolonged uncertainty. These results strongly suggest that humans assign an intrinsic value to information in a manner inconsistent with normative accounts of decision making under uncertainty. This intrinsic value may be associated with adaptive behaviour in real-world environments by producing a bias towards exploratory and information-seeking behaviour.

No abstract

The ability to voluntarily regulate our emotional response to threatening and highly arousing stimuli by using cognitive reappraisal strategies is essential for our mental and physical well-being. This might be achieved by prefrontal brain regions (e.g. inferior frontal gyrus, IFG) down-regulating activity in the amygdala. It is unknown, to which degree effective connectivity within the emotion-regulation network is linked to individual differences in reappraisal skills. Using psychophysiological interaction analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging data, we examined changes in inter-regional connectivity between the amygdala and IFG with other brain regions during reappraisal of emotional responses and used emotion regulation success as an explicit regressor. During down-regulation of emotion, reappraisal success correlated with effective connectivity between IFG with dorsolateral, dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFC). During up-regulation of emotion, effective coupling between IFG with anterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial and ventromedial PFC as well as the amygdala correlated with reappraisal success. Activity in the amygdala covaried with activity in lateral and medial prefrontal regions during the up-regulation of emotion and correlated with reappraisal success. These results suggest that successful reappraisal is linked to changes in effective connectivity between two systems, prefrontal cognitive control regions and regions crucially involved in emotional evaluation.

Perceptual decision making is believed to be driven by the accumulation of sensory evidence following stimulus encoding. More controversially, some studies report that neural activity preceding the stimulus also affects the decision process. We used a multivariate pattern classification approach for the analysis of the human electroencephalogram (EEG) to decode choice outcomes in a perceptual decision task from spatially and temporally distributed patterns of brain signals. When stimuli provided discriminative information, choice outcomes were predicted by neural activity following stimulus encoding; when stimuli provided no discriminative information, choice outcomes were predicted by neural activity preceding the stimulus. Moreover, in the absence of discriminative information, the recent choice history primed the choices on subsequent trials. A diffusion model fitted to the choice probabilities and response time distributions showed that the starting point of the evidence accumulation process was shifted toward the previous choice, consistent with the hypothesis that choice priming biases the accumulation process toward a decision boundary. This bias is reflected in prestimulus brain activity, which, in turn, becomes predictive of future decisions. Our results provide a model of how non-stimulus-driven decision making in humans could be accomplished on a neural level.

Reappraisal, the cognitive reevaluation of a potentially emotionally arousing event, has been proposed to be based upon top-down appraisal systems within the prefrontal cortex (PFC). It still remains unclear, however, how different prefrontal regions interact to control and regulate emotional responses. We used fMRI and dynamic causal modeling (DCM) to characterize the functional interrelationships among dorsal and ventral PFC regions involved in reappraisal. Specifically, we examined the effective connectivity between the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC), and other reappraisal-related regions (supplementary motor area, supramarginal gyrus) during the up- and downregulation of emotions in response to highly arousing extreme sports film clips. We found DLPFC to be the central node of the prefrontal emotion regulation network, strongly interconnected with the IFG. The DCM analysis further revealed excitatory changes of connection strength from the DLPFC to the IFG and strong inhibitory changes of connection strength between the IFG and DLPFC during reappraisal. These bidirectional changes in connectivity strength indicate a feedback mechanism by which the IFG may select one out of several possible goal-appropriate reappraisals held active in working memory (represented in the DLPFC) and inhibits the DLPFC once the selection process is completed.