What Your Decision Making Could Potentially Say About You

We are faced with conflict resolution on a day to day basis, how we resolve the conflict demonstrates a part of our personality as well as the thought process we use to solve it. However, many times we may regret the decisions we make. In Gregory Bissonette, Daniel Bryden, and Matthew Roesh's article "You Won't Regret Reading This" presenter Brian Sweis explains the discovery of the feeling of regret in rodents. They developed a model called The Restaurant Row Task where they give a mouse a time constraint inside of a circular maze with four reward zones. Each reward zone dispenses a pellet of a different flavor and as the mouse reaches the reward zone of its choosing a pitch is rung indicating the wait time for the pellet to be dispensed. During this time the mouse is in a time crunch to get as much food as possible while in the Restaurant Row Task to feed it for the day so it has to make a decision whether to stay in the preferred flavor reward zone with the long wait time or move to less preferred zone that may have a lower waiting time. In the occurrence that the mouse leaves its preferred reward zone and moves on to the second choice and hears a higher pitch indicating a longer wait time than the first, the mouse looks back at the first reward zone. This look-back action performed by the mouse to the first is what scientist have proven to interpret as the feeling of regret.

During the economic decision making of whether to stay in the first reward zone or to move on to the next one, the mouse encodes the potential expected outcomes in its Orbital Frontal Cortex and Ventral Striatum (Sweis). The function of the OFC and Ventral Striatum has been proven to be the area that reflects potential rewards, in this particular case a neuron that encodes for the pellet in the first reward zone would light up on the scanner while approaching the reward zone area. If the pitch indicates a wait time that is higher that the wait time threshold of the mouse a second neuron would begin to light up representing the change of motive of the mouse to enter a different reward zone. in the case that the pitch would be higher in the second reward zone entered by the mouse indicating a longer wait time than the first for a second choice flavor the neuron that represents the first choice pellet would activate during the performance of the look back proving that the animal is thinking of the first reward zone according to the stimulation of this neuron and it's regret in its decision of switching reward zones.
This neural pathway discovery is similar to a discovery in a recent experiment of how brain activity can reveal inner human motives in the article "The Brain's functional network Architecture Reveals Human Motives" written by Greit Hein, Yosuke Morishima, Susanne Leiberg, Sunhae Sul, and Ernst Fuhr. Since motives are purely mental constructs that are not directly observable, the use of an fMRI machine to watch activation and a Direct Causal Modeling (DCM) analysis of different regions of the brain are used together in analysis while the participant performs behavior related tasks. The use of Direct Causal Modeling and fMRI imaging allows for the uncovering of a person's choices based on the interplay between different brain regions that are active during decision-making. The interplay between the different regions is based on the thought process of the individual when faced with altruistic decisions driven by empathy or reciprocity while in the fMRI machine, the path that is demonstrated by the DCM and fMRI can tell us if the participant's inner motives are selfish or simply altruistic. This task demonstrates personality characteristics in the participants brain wiring in their thoughts that scientists can now follow, something we've never done before. So what does your decision making say about you?

Work Cited
Bissonette, Gregory B., Daniel W. Bryden, and Matthew R. Roesch. "You Won't Regret Reading This." News and Viewa. Nature Neuroscience, 25 June 2014. Web. 3 Mar. 2016.

University of Zurich. "Selfish or altruistic? Brain connectivity reveals hidden motives." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 March 2016. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/03/160303145739.htm>.

Picture 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse#/media/File:Мышь_2.jpg
Picture 2:http://empathiae.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/consciousness.jpg