Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Unit

Neural correlates of decision-making

Every day, we make countless decisions, both of the easy (coffee or tea?) and the difficult (shall I marry or not?) kind. Since decades, psychological research is trying to elucidate how we make these kinds of choices. In recent years, there is a growing interest in investigating this question with neuroscientific methods to assess both the psychological and neural processes that elicit our judgements and decisions.

In our lab, the neural correlates of decision-making are investigated using a combination of methods. Behavioural studies are combined with measures of event-related potentials (ERPs), slow potential topography (SPT) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). This combination of techniques allows to capture the structural and temporal aspects of brain activity in both emotional and cognitive systems.

Currently, the following aspects of decision-making are studied in our lab:

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Decision-Making - Neural Correlates and Possible Therapeutic Effects

Decision-making is a complex process that requires identifying alternatives, evaluating their probability and estimating their consequences. Numerous studies have shown that this process can be biased by background moods and emotions of the deciding individual. However, delaying decisions until one is cool and collected is not possible in some pathological states with affects being altered in the long term. This is the case in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Its symptoms include disturbances of attention, memory, cognition, and impaired problem-solving - all components of efficient decision-making. PTSD patients also exhibit altered brain activation in regions involved in decision-making, the anterior cingulate (ACC), orbitofrontal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Thus, decision-making is likely to be impaired in PTSD. This project aims to assess decision-making in PTSD both from a behavioural and a neurophysiological perspective, and to subsequently improve it.

Decision performance and the neural activation during decision-making will be determined in PTSD patients and healthy participants, assessed by co-registration of EEG and fMRI.

Effects of Learned Helplessness on Decision-Making

One of the regions crucial for decision-making process is the ACC (anterior cingulate cortex). Previous studies of our group showed that ACC activity is clearly reduced under learned helplessness, possibly due to inhibitory influence of the amygdala (Bauer et al. 2003). Therefore, we investigate whether learned helplessness has a detrimental effect on decicion-making processes.

Development of Decision-Strategies

The vast majority of current neuroscientific research on decicion-making deals with processes of guessing and gambling in which gains and losses are randomly assigned. However, in everyday life, predictions depend on experience. For example, a prediction like "I am certain that John will be late" is made on the basis that John has been late a couple of times in the past. The learning of such coherences improves the quality of predictions, which in turn, presumably affects the reaction to gains and losses and other aspects of the decision-making process. In this project, we investigate how different aspects of decision-making are changing when gains can be maximised by learning a certain strategy.