Decision articles from across Nature Portfolio

Using a combination of fMRI and lesion patient studies, Holton et al. show that human vmPFC causes goal perseveration during incremental goal pursuit.

Humans often interact without knowing the cooperative or competitive intentions of others. Here, the authors determined the neurocomputational mechanisms engaged in adapting to fluctuating intentions of others over repeated social interactions.

Previous work has shown that natural cardiac rhythms modulate the perception and reaction to sensory cues through changes in associated neural signals. Here, the authors show that sensitivity to prediction errors during reward learning is related to the phase of the cardiac cycle.

It is unclear how reward and risk are temporally organized in the human brain. Here, the authors demonstrate both sequential and parallel encoding of decision variables, and the role of anterior insula in reward- and risk-prediction error.

A study in mice helps to resolve a debate surrounding striatal DA dynamics and reward benefit or cost and also reveals motivation and transient striatal DA release have a bidirectional causal relationship.

Neuronal activity in the secondary motor cortex of mice engaged in a foraging task simultaneously represents multiple alternative decision-making strategies.

Two monkeys solved combinatorial optimization problems for rewards. They deliberated for extended durations, approximated efficient computational algorithms for managing complexity, and even selected algorithms according to the computational complexity of the trial. These findings reveal evidence for algorithm-based reasoning and establish a paradigm for studying the neurophysiological basis of deliberative thought.

Despite extensive studies on how social networks affect behavior at the population level, little is known about how the human brain makes decisions in networked environments. This study shows that the brain flexibly weighs information received from a social contact according to how well-connected that contact is on the network responsible for information transmission.

Frontal cortex activity contains a mixture of signals for different behavioral and cognitive processes. Analysis of 20,000 frontal cortical neurons during a tactile decision-making task revealed functional clusters encoding specific behavioral variables. By manipulating the inputs to frontal cortex, we attributed the origin of their activities to inputs from the thalamus.