Topic: anterior insula

Flexibility in a dynamic and uncertain world is critical for individuals to survive and thrive. An appropriately flexible agent should know when to exploit a known resource or explore for a potentially better one. Previous research indicates that prefrontal brain regions including the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), as well as the anterior insula are critical for value computation and decision-making. However, how these brain regions encode and transfer computed values to resolve the exploration-exploitation dilemma still remains unknown. We studied human cogni

Counterfactual information, or the mental representation of alternative outcomes, plays a critical role in value-based decision-making by allowing individuals to evaluate both chosen and unchosen options. Aberrant counterfactual processing is linked to psychiatric disorders like major depressive disorder (MDD). While the neural encoding of counterfactual outcomes is established, the mechanisms by which this feedback affects future decision-making are less clear. Using human intracranial electrophysiology, we show that counterfactual feedback influences subsequent choice behavior through beta o

Primates possess sophisticated social cognitive abilities, interpreting complex social cues and producing adaptive behaviors in real-time. These abilities are thought to rely on distributed circuits spanning sensory, limbic, and prefrontal brain regions. Despite some progress in identifying neural correlates of specific social features, such as gaze and social rank, a comprehensive computational framework linking social perception to behavior remains elusive; at least in part due to the high dimensionality of both the input space (complex social scenes) and the output space (diverse behavioral

Stressful behavior is transferred epigenetically. Here we study the biophysical mechanism of such epigenetic inheritance. Mice were exposed to varying protocols of tone-shock fear conditioning: a predictable group exposed to repetitions of consistent pairs of tone-shock; an unpredictable group exposed to tone and shocks in a random order; a naïve control [MOU1] group exposed to home cage conditions. After two weeks, all groups were exposed to the tone only for three days. The unpredictable group exhibited significantly higher freezing than both control and predictable groups on all three days,

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges humanity has ever faced, but the fields of social and decision neuroscience have contributed surprisingly little to our understanding of pro-environmental behavior. Across two studies, we adapted a well-established paradigm developed to study effortful prosocial behavior to investigate pro-environmental behavior. In study one, 74 participants engaged in a decision-making task, where they could earn a varying amount of money for themselves or a pro-environmental organization by investing a varying amount of physical force (measured by a hand-grip

The aim of this fMRI study was to assess the role of affect sharing (AS), an important aspect of empathy, in observational fear learning. N=37 students completed an observational Pavlovian fear conditioning paradigm, in which they learned to fear a cue (assessed in a subsequent test stage) by watching videos of a demonstrator receiving shocks with that cue (learning stage). Participants watched the videos in a state of high or low AS, respectively, induced by hypnotic suggestions, using a within-subjects design. Unconditioned responses (UR) to the demonstrator’s pain during learning and condit