Different Strategies To Make Risky Decisions!

Disorders Cure

oi-Staff

By Staff

Friday, June 12, 2009, 14:16

Taking risky decisions is an essential part during this economic downturn. People use different strategies while making difficult economic decisions to cope up with the situation. Surprisingly, a scientific study can predict what sort of strategy people tended to use!

If there were large responses to monetary reward in a brain area called the ventral striatum, that person tended to simplify decision problems to only consider winning or losing. The decisions will be affected by the person"s such as high impulsivity, but ongoing depression. The brain regions classically associated with "rational" processing, particularly the lateral prefrontal cortex, were most active when subjects used a simplifying strategy inconsistent with traditional rational-choice models.

The decision-making is complex enough to relate to 'real-world' decisions but simple enough to be studied using functional MRI. Brain regions classically associated with "rational" processing, particularly the lateral prefrontal cortex, were most active when subjects used a simplifying strategy inconsistent with traditional rational-choice models. This result suggests that it was the type of computation that the participants were doing at any given time that activates a brain region, not whether the thought process is rational or irrational.

The finding argues strongly against the commonly held notion that there are 'rational' and 'irrational parts of the brain. The medial prefrontal region of the brain shapes moment-to-moment changes in the strategies people use to make decisions. We all make some decisions opposite to our usual tendencies. When we do so, this brain region comes online and alters activation in other choice-related regions.