Topic: dACC microstimulation

Balancing exploration and exploitation is crucial for navigating unpredictable, ever-changing environments. Exploitation stabilizes decision-making to maximize rewards while exploration introduces variability, destabilizing behavior to search for new opportunities. Previous studies have implicated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) in exploratory decision-making, but also in tracking important decision-making variables like reward. Critically, the relationship between dACC and these variables remains ambiguous because neither link has been tested causally. Here, we stimulated dACC dur