PLanning and Choice

When engaging in sequential behaviours, being able to anticipate the future is very useful. Thus, we build a cognitive model that estimates the value of the future beyond the next outcome when making decisions. We then developed a paradigm that encouraged participants to plan into the future, manipulating search value by changing the future time horizon and the properties of the environment across trials. We condensed the overall benefit of planning in every trial in a term called prospective value. We then looked at how prospective value is computed and updated in a sequential search/foraging context. dACC coordinated with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), and appeared to compute the initial prospective value of the environment when making a decision. 

Furthermore, we found that Apathy, far from making people not engage with sequential search, made people oversearch. As this form of decision inertia was quite surprising we reaffirmed it's robustness using a pre-registration and large online samples.

References : Kolling* and Scholl*, Chekroud, Trier, Rushworth (2018) Prospection, perseverance, and insight in sequential behaviour, Neuron doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2018.08.018.

J Scholl, H Trier, M Rushworth*, N Kolling* (2022) The effect of apathy and compulsivity on planning and stopping in sequential decision-making, PLOS Biology, doi: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3001566

Just like a neuro-economic framework was dominant in decision neuroscience, risk taking has primarily been considered to be a problem of personality traits. However, when biologists talk about risk taking, they emphasize the external and internal risk pressures an animal is under. For example, when the night approaches birds frequently engage in more risky behaviour if they are still hungry. Thus, we wanted to understand how humans can flexibly assess risks, when their environment is changing. For this purpose, we designed a new experimental paradigm and cognitive model that considered participants current risk pressure to assign a risk bonus to each potential option when making risky choices.

We found participants were very sensitive to changes in risk pressure, changing their probability and magnitude weighting flexibly.

Neurally, we found that dACC tracked the current environmental pressure to take risks and relative value of the risky option, while vmPFC was most active during the gambling choices when value modulation was unnecessary. Frontal polar cortex was linked to people’s flexible assessment of their current risk preference as it signalled the current context and value independently of the current trial’s choice and as its activity was predictive of people being able to assess risks flexibly. 

Reference: Kolling, Wittmann, Rushworth (2014) Multiple neural mechanisms of decision-making and their competition under changing risk pressure. Neuron doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2014.01.033.