Is it better to wear a face mask or to stay at home? If you stay at home, you won't get Covid-19. If you go out, you may or may not be infected. What should you do then?
When faced with little and big choices in life, the better informed are better at examining advantages and risks, and in decision making. And the outcome of choices is then assessed based on expectations and context.
Now, a research study was able to unveil the neural mechanisms of what we have learned from experience. The study established that, when faced with a choice to make, the brain uses different weights and measures based on knowledge of possible advantages and disadvantages in a given situation.
The research work was conducted at the University of Trento, in the laboratories of CIMeC - the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, in collaboration with a French research group based at Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationnelles (Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale).
Their findings appeared days ago in The Journal of Neuroscience.
Further details in the press release
About the article
The article “The Effect of Counterfactual Information on Outcome Value Coding in Medial Prefrontal and Cingulate Cortex: From an Absolute to a Relative Neural Code” was published on 15 April 2020 in The Journal of Neuroscience.
The authors are Doris Pischedda and Giorgio Coricelli (Center for Mind/Brain Sciences - CIMeC, University of Trento) and Stefano Palminteri (Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et Computationnelles, Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale, Paris, France).
The abstract of the article is available in Open Access
(DOI: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1712-19.2020)