Ambiguity and conflict: Dissecting uncertainty in decision-making.

Abstract

Making decisions is fundamental to how we navigate, survive, and thrive in our environment. The quality of information used to support decisions is rarely perfect. Many decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty, arising from ambiguous or conflicting information. Conflict and ambiguity, though conceptually distinct, both generate uncertainty, a commonality that has led to overlapping and inconsistent terminology in the literature. Evidence from human and animal research suggests a behavioral dissociation in responding to conflict and ambiguity. This dissociation can be studied through the implementation of spatial or operant tasks in rodents which find close parallels in gambling tasks in humans. Pharmacological manipulations in rodents and fMRI studies in humans further suggest a dissociation in the neural processing of conflict and ambiguity such that fronto-striato-parietal circuits may be most important for interpreting ambiguous information, while the ventral striatum and ventral hippocampus are critical for resolving conflicting information. Overall, the neural representation and resolution of conflict and ambiguity remain relatively understudied despite the fundamental importance of these processes to understanding decisionmaking. We highlight the need for further research to differentiate these related yet distinct processes through implementation of carefully designed behavioral tasks with neural circuit-dissection techniques and the potential to pursue translational research between rodents and humans.

Uncertainty gates redundancy in reward integration in prefrontal-cortical and ventral-hippocampal nucleus accumbens inputs to tune engagement

“…vHip-NAc disengages when reward is passively encountered or action-elicited reward is consistently encountered, such that action-induced uncertainty is low. This functional recruitment under uncertainty is reminiscent of the role of vHip in resolving motivational uncertainty and conflict in explicit conflict tasks (Iyer et al, 2022; Schumacher et al, 2016, 2018). Our findings suggest that this function may generalize to other kinds of uncertainty such that vHip-NAc is also sensitive to action-elicited uncertainty in gating neural encoding and behavioral engagement in reward seeking.…”

“…A major function attributed to the vHip is resolving uncertainty (Iyer et al, 2022;Schumacher et al, 2016Schumacher et al, , 2018. Therefore, we reasoned that the increased information carried by vHip-NAc in encoding reward that follows unreward might indicate that vHip-NAc preferentially encodes outcomes when reward is less certain.…”

Persistent Decision-Making in Mice, Monkeys, and Humans

“…This is most obvious in the mouse, where the rise of optogenetics and other techniques dependent on genetic expression (Boyden et al, 2005) means that there has been an increasing use of mice for cognitive function research in recent years (Ellenbroek and Youn, 2016). This is especially true in the area of decision-making under uncertainty, where there has been a recent explosion of research using rodent models (Saddoris et al, 2015;Groman et al, 2016;Bari et al, 2019;Izquierdo et al, 2019;Soltani and Izquierdo, 2019;Chen et al, 2021aChen et al, , 2021bGrossman et al, 2022;Iyer et al, 2022). Although these studies have led to fundamental insights, the overarching goal in both psychology and neuroscience remains understanding human cognition and diseases, by translating findings from animal studies into applications in humans.…”