Anterior Cingulate Cortex: Monitoring The Outcomes Of Others' Decisions

Main Category: Neurology / Neuroscience
Article Date: 11 Jun 2009 - 6:00 PDT

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Good decision-making helps us to achieve our goals in a complicated world. Understanding which decisions are successful and which ones fail is important, and learning how other people make decisions is an important way of refining this ability. What happens in the brain when this useful information is withheld? Brain imaging researchers from Royal Holloway University of London (UK) investigated activity in the human brain at the time that volunteers interpreted the successes and failures of their own decisions, or the successes and failures of others' decisions. Crucially, when this important information was withheld, a region of the brain called the Anterior Cingulate Cortex became active in different ways depending on whether the information withheld related to decisions of the person in the scanner, or whether it related to the person that they were monitoring during the experiment. This tells us that this area works in different ways depending on whether gaps in important information relate to ourselves, or whether they relate to others'.

Authors: MA Apps, JH Balsters, N Ramnani, Royal Holloway University of London, London, United Kingdom

Source: Organization for Human Brain Mapping