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Divide and conquer: strategic decision areas

Nature Neuroscience volume 18, pages 616–618 (2015)Cite this article

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Strategic decisions can prove difficult to study. The board game shogi is used to investigate the functional neuroanatomy of strategic decisions, revealing different brain areas from those engaged by other forms of choice.

Historians debate what moved Napoleon to attack the English at Waterloo or the Duke of Wellington to decide to hold and defend his position. By contrast, readers of this article may ponder their repeated tendency to choose chocolate cake over fruit for their teatime snack. These decisions sound very different from one another because one has the power to shape history whereas the other can only shape one's waistline. But what remains less clear is whether they are also different in terms of the brain regions that they engage. This is because research into the neurobiology of value-based decision-making has so far primarily focused on the latter, 'economic' form of decision over the former, 'strategic' decision. This reflects not an unwillingness among military generals to volunteer for neuroimaging studies, but a more fundamental problem: how might one ask subjects to make strategic decisions inside the scanner while estimating the factors that motivate their choices.

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Figure 1: Many routes to a decision.

monkeybusinessimages/Matthieu_Photoglosky/Jack Wackerhausen/Thinkstock

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nils Kolling is in the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK,

    Nils Kolling

  2. and the Sobell Department of Motor Neuroscience and Movement Disorders, Laurence T. Hunt is at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, London, UK, University College London, London, UK.,

    Laurence T Hunt

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  1. Nils Kolling
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  2. Laurence T Hunt
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Correspondence to Nils Kolling or Laurence T Hunt.

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Kolling, N., Hunt, L. Divide and conquer: strategic decision areas. Nat Neurosci 18, 616–618 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4005

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