Decision articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tolerance for risk decreases with age, but it is not known whether this shift can be accounted for by a neurobiological marker. Here, authors show that the age-related decrease in risk tolerance is better accounted for by grey matter decreases in right posterior parietal cortex than by age per se.

    • Michael A. Grubb
    • , Agnieszka Tymula
    •  & Ifat Levy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Decision-making balances the benefits of additional information with the cost of time, but it is unclear whether humans adjust this balance within individual decisions. Here, authors show that we do make such adjustments to suit contextual demands and suggest that these are driven by modulation of neural gain.

    • Peter R. Murphy
    • , Evert Boonstra
    •  & Sander Nieuwenhuis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The motor cortex executes responses based on sensory choices, but it is unknown whether it also impacts response selection. Here, Pape and Siegel show that motor cortex activity present before decision making predicts responses and that this activity is influenced by previous button-presses.

    • Anna-Antonia Pape
    •  & Markus Siegel

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) is involved in changing behavioural strategies. Recording neural ensembles in rats, Powell and Redish find that the requirement for those changes is represented in mPFC before they manifest behaviourally, both in tasks that externally force a change and in tasks with self-determined change.

    • Nathaniel James Powell
    •  & A. David Redish

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Economic decisions are based on perceived reward value but it is unclear how individual neurons encode value estimates as input for decision mechanisms. Here authors show that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex uses a dynamic value code based on object-specific valuations by single neurons.

    • Ken-Ichiro Tsutsui
    • , Fabian Grabenhorst
    •  & Wolfram Schultz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The influence of context on value-based choice is well established but the neural correlates associated with this remain poorly understood. Here the authors perform fMRI in human subjects and find that the hippocampus and ventral tegmental area/substantia nigra are associated with the degree of influence of context on choice behaviour.

    • Francesco Rigoli
    • , Karl J. Friston
    •  & Raymond J. Dolan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drift diffusion models (DDM) are fundamental to our understanding of perceptual decision-making. Here, the authors show that DDM can implement optimal choice strategies in value-based decisions but require sufficient knowledge of reward contingencies and collapsing decision boundaries with time.

    • Satohiro Tajima
    • , Jan Drugowitsch
    •  & Alexandre Pouget

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Past experiences and future predictions both shape our decisions. Here, the authors trained participants in a foraging task in which reward rates varied systematically over time and find the dACC tracks both recent and past reward rates, leading to opposing effects on decisions about whether to stay or leave a reward environment.

    • Marco K. Wittmann
    • , Nils Kolling
    •  & Matthew F. S. Rushworth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Information seeking is thought to rely on the brain's frontal cortex but which regions specifically control this drive remains unknown. Here the authors show that monkeys deciding to seek information on the current state of the environment showed specific neural dynamics in the lateral prefrontal cortex and midcingulate cortex.

    • Frederic M. Stoll
    • , Vincent Fontanier
    •  & Emmanuel Procyk

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Integrating information from both the external environment and an organism's internal state is an important aspect of feeding-related decision making. Here, the authors identify a two neuron circuit within the mollusc Lymnaeathat adapts feeding behaviour according to food availability and motivational state.

    • Michael Crossley
    • , Kevin Staras
    •  & György Kemenes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mothers advocate eating healthy foods while children like to eat tasty foods. Lim and colleagues demonstrate that children incorporate their mothers' food choices while deciding what to eat as well as provide the neural correlates of this decision making process.

    • Seung-Lark Lim
    • , J. Bradley C. Cherry
    •  & Amanda S. Bruce

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans are often biased in estimating the precise influence of probabilistic events on their decisions. Here, Khorsand and colleagues report a behavioural task that produces these biases in inference and describe a biophysically-plausible model that captures these behavioural deviations from optimal decision making.

    • Alireza Soltani
    • , Peyman Khorsand
    •  & Janet Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The zero-determinant (ZD) strategies discovered by Press and Dyson overturned several decades of consensus about the iterated prisoner's dilemma. Here, the authors provide the first empirical evidence in support of Press and Dyson’s theory, by showing that knowledge of the opponent and the length of the interaction can facilitate the Generous and Extortionate ZD strategies as predicted.

    • Zhijian Wang
    • , Yanran Zhou
    •  & Bin Xu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The orbitofrontal cortex is associated with foraging behaviour yet the structural changes underlying such rule-based learning remain unclear. Here, the authors imaged OFC axons throughout a digging-based odour discrimination task and found correlations between the rate of bouton turnover and the behavioural strategies of individual mice.

    • Carolyn M. Johnson
    • , Hannah Peckler
    •  & Linda Wilbrecht

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Recent studies suggest that value-based choices involve communication between parietal and prefrontal cortices. Here the authors use a novel, non-invasive cortical manipulation technique to demonstrate a causal role for such communication in mediating accurate value-based, but not perceptual, choices.

    • Rafael Polanía
    • , Marius Moisa
    •  & Christian C. Ruff

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In cognitive neuroscience, it is common practice to use reaction time data to infer whether decisions are intuitive or deliberate. Here the authors demonstrate that they can replicate, eliminate and reverse previously reported correlations between selfishness and reaction time.

    • Ian Krajbich
    • , Björn Bartling
    •  & Ernst Fehr

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The activity of sensory neurons can be correlated with perceptual decisions and this effect may provide insights into how sensory information is processed during perceptual tasks. Here the authors develop a network model of sensory and decision-making areas and propose that the dynamics across the network hierarchy explains the choice probabilities.

    • Klaus Wimmer
    • , Albert Compte
    •  & Jaime de la Rocha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In humans, choice between actions depends on the ability to compare action–outcome values. Here, the authors show that action–outcome values are compared on the basis of the relative advantage of a particular action over alternative actions, which takes place in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain.

    • Richard W. Morris
    • , Amir Dezfouli
    •  & Bernard W. Balleine

  • Article |

    Visual attention is known to affect choice certainty, but exactly how is unclear. Here, the authors use electroencephalography in a visual motion discrimination task and identify neural correlates of choice certainty, which precede the decided action.

    • Leopold Zizlsperger
    • , Thomas Sauvigny
    •  & Thomas Haarmeier

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Reinforcement learning quantifies the change in behaviour in response to past experience. Using field goal attempt data from basketball, Neiman and Loewenstein demonstrate that even one failed or made attempt has an impact on subsequent attempts, showing that players overgeneralize from their most recent actions.

    • Tal Neiman
    •  & Yonatan Loewenstein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Drosophila melanogaster larvae demonstrate chemotaxis towards odours but their navigation mechanism is poorly understood. Using computer-vision tracking, Gomez-Marinet al.show that larvae ascend odour gradients using an active sampling strategy that is analogous to sniffing in vertebrates.

    • Alex Gomez-Marin
    • , Greg J. Stephens
    •  & Matthieu Louis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many animals can do simple quantity discrimination, but they often perform poorly when food is used. Here, the authors show that monkeys are good at food quantity discrimination when they are not allowed to eat it, suggesting that the mental representation of the stimuli is more important than the physical quality.

    • Vanessa Schmitt
    •  & Julia Fischer

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