Decision articles within Nature

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The Drosophila egg-deposition motor programme is initiated once a rise-to-threshold process hits a threshold, and subthreshold variation in this process regulates the time spent considering options.

    • Vikram Vijayan
    • , Fei Wang
    •  & Gaby Maimon

  • Article |

    A computational model based on a heuristic value function and forward search algorithm predicts human choices, response times and eye movements in games of games of four-in-a-row, and shows evidence for increased planning and improved attention with increased expertise.

    • Bas van Opheusden
    • , Ionatan Kuperwajs
    •  & Wei Ji Ma

  • Article |

    High-resolution volumetric calcium imaging was used to create a functional atlas of the Drosophila melanogaster ventral brain and identify how and where metabolic and reproductive states alter processing of food-related sensory stimuli.

    • Daniel Münch
    • , Dennis Goldschmidt
    •  & Carlos Ribeiro

  • Article |

    Noradrenaline-expressing neurons in the locus coeruleus in mouse facilitate task execution and encode reinforcement in learning tasks, via partially modular projections to the cortex.

    • Vincent Breton-Provencher
    • , Gabrielle T. Drummond
    •  & Mriganka Sur

  • Article |

    Wireless tracking of neuronal activity in social groups of mice identifies neurons in the anterior cingulate that hold representations of an animal’s social rank and can influence the competitive effort that the animal exerts.

    • S. William Li
    • , Omer Zeliger
    •  & Ziv M. Williams

  • Article |

    Exposure to a novel experience can ‘reset’ connections between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in mice, allowing them to overcome an existing learned behaviour and to replace it with a new one.

    • Alan J. Park
    • , Alexander Z. Harris
    •  & Joshua A. Gordon

  • Article |

    In macaque motor cortex, moment-to-moment fluctuations in neurally derived decision variables are tightly linked to decision state and predict behavioural choices with better accuracy than condition-averaged decision variables or the visual stimulus alone, and can be used to distinguish between different models of decision making.

    • Diogo Peixoto
    • , Jessica R. Verhein
    •  & William T. Newsome

  • Article |

    Simultaneous mapping of activity across the cortex and dorsal striatum in mice shows that activity in each part of the striatum precisely mirrors that in topographically associated cortical regions, consistently across behavioural contexts.

    • Andrew J. Peters
    • , Julie M. J. Fabre
    •  & Matteo Carandini

  • Article |

    The results obtained by seventy different teams analysing the same functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset show substantial variation, highlighting the influence of analytical choices and the importance of sharing workflows publicly and performing multiple analyses.

    • Rotem Botvinik-Nezer
    • , Felix Holzmeister
    •  & Tom Schonberg

  • Article |

    Frontal cortex neurons can be grouped into categorical response types corresponding to particular decision variables, such as reward size, decision confidence, or value, and individual variables may be encoded in distinct projection populations; this suggests that, like  neurons in sensory cortex, frontal neurons form a sparse and overcomplete representation of important variables in the environment.

    • Junya Hirokawa
    • , Alexander Vaughan
    •  & Adam Kepecs

  • Letter |

    Calcium imaging data from mice performing a virtual reality auditory decision-making task are used to analyse the population codes in primary auditory and posterior parietal cortex that support choice behaviour.

    • Caroline A. Runyan
    • , Eugenio Piasini
    •  & Christopher D. Harvey

  • Letter |

    Activity in regions of the brain have been correlated with decision making but determining whether such relationships are correlative or causative has been challenging; using a technique to reversibly inactivate brain areas in monkeys reveals that although there is decision-related activity in the lateral intraparietal (LIP) area, LIP is not critical for the perceptual decisions studied here.

    • Leor N. Katz
    • , Jacob L. Yates
    •  & Alexander C. Huk

  • Article |

    Combining neural manipulation in freely behaving animals, physiological studies and electron microscopy reconstruction in the Drosophila larva identifies a complex multilsensory circuit involved in the selection of larval escape modes that exhibits a multilevel multimodal convergence architecture.

    • Tomoko Ohyama
    • , Casey M. Schneider-Mizell
    •  & Marta Zlatic

  • Letter |

    A method to measure the precise relationship between neuronal firing rates and the representation of accumulated evidence is described; results in the parietal and prefrontal cortex of rats, together with transient optogenetic inactivation of the prefrontal cortex, challenge the prevailing view that the prefrontal cortex is part of the neural circuit for accumulating evidence, and suggest that neurons in parietal and prefrontal areas have distinct relationships to evidence accumulation in decision-making.

    • Timothy D. Hanks
    • , Charles D. Kopec
    •  & Carlos D. Brody

  • Letter |

    Drosophila male courtship songs were thought to have a fixed structure with song repetition variations introduced unintentionally because of neural noise; this behavioural assay and computational modelling study instead reveals that males use fast changes in sensory information to actively pattern individual song sequences.

    • Philip Coen
    • , Jan Clemens
    •  & Mala Murthy

  • Article |

    It is known that compressed sequences of hippocampal place cells can ‘replay’ previous navigational trajectories in linearly constrained mazes; here, rat place-cell sequences representing two-dimensional spatial trajectories were observed before navigational decisions, and predicted the immediate navigational path.

    • Brad E. Pfeiffer
    •  & David J. Foster

  • Letter |

    Economic games are used to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying cooperative behaviour, and show that intuition supports cooperation in social dilemmas, whereas reflection can undermine these cooperative impulses.

    • David G. Rand
    • , Joshua D. Greene
    •  & Martin A. Nowak

  • News & Views |

    The brain's parietal cortex seems to orchestrate decision-making without single neurons performing 'solos'. Rather, decision-specific motifs emerge as highly organized sequences of short-lived neuronal activity. See Article p.62

    • Eduardo Dias-Ferreira
    •  & Rui M. Costa

  • Autumn Books |

    Jacek Debiec enjoys two complementary books charting the psychology and neuroscience of decision-making.

    • Jacek Debiec

  • News & Views |

    Theory suggests that the accuracy of a decision often increases with the number of decision makers, a phenomenon exploited by betting agents, Internet search engines and stock markets. Fish also use this 'wisdom of the crowd' effect.

    • Larissa Conradt

  • Comment |

    A critical mass of female voices changes the tenor of political and corporate decisions — and should be used to galvanize climate policy, says Susan Buckingham.

    • Susan Buckingham

  • Opinion |

    People's grasp of scientific debates can improve if communicators build on the fact that cultural values influence what and whom we believe, says Dan Kahan.

    • Dan Kahan

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