Decisions, Decisions!

Essentially everything you do will require making a decision.

Deciding whether or not you’ll want to eat breakfast before starting your day.

Deciding if you’ll want to wear a certain outfit or not.

Deciding to stay up and binge watch a television series or sleep.

Our day is filled with decisions and every decision will not be your best.

In the article “You wont regret reading this” Steiner, Redish, and Swiss aspire to understand the neural signals related to regret through observing rats perform an economic decision task. A model, later dubbed the Restaurant Row task, contained four reward zones that would distribute a certain flavored reward. Upon the rats arrival in a reward zone, the rat would hear a certain pitch that would reveal how long it would have to wait for it’s reward. Through this, Steiner and Redish were able to understand the threshold the rats were willing to wait for a certain reward. However, there were times when a rat would skip a reward zone they particularly liked due to the wait and moved on to a reward zone that would unfortunately have the same wait time but with a “not as satisfying” reward. In that case, the rat would turn it’s head and look back at the

previous zone, which was interpreted by Steiner and Redish as regret. Through more neural analysis, data suggested that the rats “were thinking about the choice that they could have made if they had stayed at the previous zone. [And] that activity during the look back was similar to the activity when the rat had previously considered that reward zone”. This information was decoded in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) which Steiner and Redish believe is crucial for representing outcomes when animals think about future or past decisions, as well as regret. Evidence that suggested the OFC’s importance with regret is demonstrated in humans with OFC damage, who “do not report regret or anticipate negative consequences of actions while performing gambling tasks”.

It’s important to understand how neural signals affects emotions related to regret and it’s affects on decision making. Kinga Jurasovai , Marián Spajdeli seek to explore this idea from a more psychological view in their journal “The Role of Regret in Rational Decision Making”.

Jurasovai and Spajdeli wanted to understand the process of rational decision making includes a step of regret anticipation. They gathered a total of 63 people, with a mean age of 19.6, to participate in the study in which they took a questionnaire to be classified as a rational or non-rational decision maker. “The questionnaire contains 11 items, referring to four aspects of rational decision making. [For example] Before the decision I try to consider the maximum of available information; During decision making I try to anticipate the consequences of my future decision; Before the decision I need to clearly see the pros and cons of the decision alternatives; I try to evaluate all of the possible decision alternatives”. With each statement, each participant would be asked to represent their agreement/disagreement on a 6-point scale. The higher the scored, the participant was classified as a rational decision maker, officially dividing the group into the two categories. Each group was then exposed to a “regret-induced” situation and were then asked to evaluate their intensity of regret. Through analysis, it was concluded that rational decision makers have a higher tendency of regret anticipation than a non rational decision maker. However, there was no difference in the experienced regret intensity between the two groups immediately after the decision.

Results from Jurasovai and Spajdeli’s study suggests that the decision making type, whether it's rational or non-rational, will not determine the occurrence of regret, but rather will affect the regret anticipation during the decision making process.

So taking into account the work of Jurasovai and Spajdelis, and the work of Steiner, Redish, and Swiss, it is reasonable to question how the OFC is in rational thinkers in comparison to and non-rational thinkers during the decision making process itself. What is the difference in neural activity in the OFC of rational decision makers during the decision making process in comparison to the non-rational decision makers? Can this difference help us understand the cost-benefit analysis done prior to a decision being made?

We’re all told from a young age that our decisions will always have outcomes that can be positive or negative, regrettable or wonderufl. So understanding decision making can help us further understand what makes us who we are, and why we choose what we do.

References:

Jurasovai, Kinga, and Spajedeli. "The Role of Regret in Ration Decision Making." Institute of Experimental Psychology, Slovak Academy of Science, 22 Nov. 2010. Web.

<http://flagship.luc.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=61835876&site=ehost-live>

Bissonette, Gregory B., Daniel W. Bryden, and Matthew R. Roesch. "You Won't Regret Reading This." Nature Neuroscience. N.p., 25 June 2014. Web.

<http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n7/full/nn.3745.html>