Nat Human Behavior: Research reveals the brain-determining mechanisms by which people make behaviors

December 5, 2020 // -- In a recent study, neuroscientistes from the University of Emory have provided clear visual evidence that the brain's abdominal synth is responsible for weighing costs and benefits in people's decision-making processes.
results were published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
understand the neural mechanisms behind motivation," said Shosuke Suzuki, a psychology graduate student at Emory University and lead author of the study.
our work has broad implications for the treatment of related diseases, such as depression, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder.
michael Treadway, senior author of the study and distinguished research professor at Winship in the Emory Department of Psychology and the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, added: "The willingness to work hard is critical to our survival and something we use every day.
we have identified two tightly overlapping but distinct abdominal syroid regions that involve different stages of effort-based decision-making.
we provide a specific neuroimaging tool to measure the sensitivity of signals associated with these phases.
," Treadways said, the new approach could provide a window into how the drug affects the brains of patients with motivational defects compared to the control group.
Treadway's lab is dedicated to understanding the molecular and circuit-level mechanisms of mental symptoms associated with mood disorders, anxiety, and decision-making.
the abdominal syroids are located deep in the hemisphere of the brain, are areas associated with exercise, and mediate rewarding experiences and motivations.
neuroimaging, the abdominal syroids are activated during the decision-making process to encode the potential value of incentives associated with costs, such as waiting times and probabilities.
previous studies of rodents have shown that abdominal syroids are essential to motivate animals to win rewards such as food.
also showed evidence of two opposite signals in the abdominal syroids.
the animal to prepare for the event, the discount signal helps the animal select rewards that require minimal effort.
these signals can help animals work on demand, while also ensuring that their workload is beyond the necessary range.
the presence of these signals has never been tested in humans.
Emory researchers believe that as the physical cost of performing tasks increases, activation signals will drive an increase in abdominal synth activity, while a reduction in signals will lead to less abdominal syringe activity.
they suggest that triggering both signals makes it difficult to detect value signals in previous studies.
complexity of detecting brain activation associated with physical strength is that neuroimaging requires participants to remain in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines while scanning the brain.
to solve these problems, the researchers designed a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment that allowed participants to maintain a receding position and separate nerve signals involving effort from those associated with the cost of effort.
for the first set of experiments, the researchers created a virtual maze.
scanning their brains, the researchers were shown maze navigation tasks that required varying degrees of effort.
in one case, participants watched as they passively passed through a virtual maze.
other case, they can move around the maze by simply pressing the button on the handheld device.
third case requires more effort to press the button repeatedly and quickly to cross the maze.
successfully complete each maze, they will receive a symbolic reward.
second experiment measured the participants' neural activity, and they made a series of choices between the two options, each requiring different levels of reward and effort.
the workload and reward amounts in turn to try to isolate the workload activation signals during the expected workload requirements.
results showed that two different areas of the abdominal syroids triggered and partially overlapped in response to different stages of manual labor and effort-based decision-making.
the abdominal area is mainly related to reward and effort costs, while activities in the backside area are mainly related to the beginning of the effort movement.
now, researchers hope to build a foundation on this increased understanding of how the brain encodes signals related to motivation.
() Source: A new view of how brain decides to make an effort Source: Shosuke Suzuki et al. Distinct regions of the striatum underlying effort, movement initiation and effort discounting, Nature Human Behaviour (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-00972-y Original link: