We often make strategic decisions intuitively – before evaluating all our options. For example, in games of strategy, players quickly adopt a stance of attack or defense. Exactly how this occurs, is not clear to brain researchers. Now, an imaging study of people playing the Japanese chess game shogi reveals some new clues about this intuitive strategy decision process.
In the journal Nature Neuroscience, researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan, describe how they discovered two different regions within the cingulate cortex region of the brain separately encoded the values of offensive and defensive strategies as shogi players viewed different board layouts.
One region lies toward the front of the brain and the other towards the back. Senior author Dr. Keiji Tanaka, who leads the Cognitive Brain Mapping team at RIKEN, says:
“We were surprised that the brain activity in two regions depended on which strategy was chosen.”
For their study on how the brain guides intuitive thinking, the team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain activity of competent amateur players of shogi as they were shown different board configurations and quickly decided whether to adopt a defense or attack strategy.
The researchers chose to study shogi players because they can sit very still for the brain scans and because the game has moves that can be clearly categorized as offensive or defensive.
In order to separate brain activity linked to decisions about moves from decisions about strategy, for about half the time of the experiment, the players were told which strategy to adopt – either attack or defense – and to choose the best possible move from a shortlist. This meant during that time the scans were picking up only on activity about best moves.
When they analyzed the scans against the various types of decision the players were making, the team found that choosing an attack strategy was linked to greater activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (toward the back of the brain), and choosing to defend was associated with greater activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (toward the front of the brain).
The team found that a third region, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was equally active for both strategies.
The results also showed that the three brain regions were more active when players were choosing a strategy than when choosing moves once they were given a strategy to follow.
Further analysis showed that the activity in these brain regions was linked to the board values of the offensive and defensive strategies, and not just the decision of whether to attack or defend.
It showed that the level of activity in the rostral anterior cingulate cortex corresponded with the defense value, and at the same time, the level of activity in the posterior cingulate cortex corresponded with the attack value.
The team also found that the level of activity in the third region – the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – correlated with the difference between attack and defense values, suggesting it played a role in the ultimate decision to attack or defend.
Finally, the team compared the results with player performance. They found that the players were better at choosing the best strategy than the best move, and that strategy decisions took a lot less time.
The team suggests their findings show the players chose their strategy as a result of heightened perceptual awareness of the board layout – in other words their intuition – and not after reasoning through the options.
Dr. Tanaka says clarifying the brain mechanisms behind this type of strategic decision-making can help us develop better models to understand intuition, and suggests:
“This knowledge could have several applications, such as guiding decision-making in sophisticated artificial intelligence.”
In April 2013, Medical News Today learned of a study that showed when rats were faced with a series of challenges where they had to make a decision, their performance was just as good when they decided rapidly as when they took a lot more time to respond.