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Cognitive and neural bases of visual-context-guided decision-making
Sai Sun1, Hongbo Yu2, Shuo Wang3
1Frontier Research Institute for Interdisciplinary Sciences, Tohoku University, 6-3 Aramaki Aoba, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8578, Japan; Research Institute of Electrical Communication, Tohoku University, 2-1-1 Katahira, Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8577, Japan.
Visual salience guides human decision-making by influencing attention and reward systems. This study reveals how task-irrelevant visual cues modulate behavior through neural pathways, impacting habitual and goal-directed processes.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Decision Science
- Neuroeconomics
Background:
- Human behavior adjustment relies on feedback, influenced by preferences and contextual factors like visual salience.
- Decision-making processes may involve habitual and goal-directed mechanisms modulated by attention and subjective valuation.
Purpose of the Study:
- Investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms of visual salience-driven decision-making.
- Test the hypothesis that visual salience influences attention and subjective valuation, impacting habitual and goal-directed processes.
Main Methods:
- Conducted behavioral experiments (n=136) manipulating visual salience and feedback specificity.
- Utilized eye-tracking to measure attention deployment.
- Employed neuroimaging (fMRI) to examine neural correlates in the frontal-striatal system.
Main Results:
- A visual salience effect on decision-making (staying frequency) was confirmed and found to be feedback-specific.
- Salience guided attention, as evidenced by correlations between eye-fixation patterns and behavioral adjustments.
- Striatal subregions encoded salience-based evaluation, while the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) mediated behavioral adjustments.
Conclusions:
- Task-irrelevant visual salience drives decision-making by modulating attention and frontal-striatal valuation systems.
- The findings provide a neurocognitive account of how visual context influences behavior, integrating habitual and goal-directed processes.
- Connectivity within the frontal-striatal circuit underlies individual differences in decision-making strategies.
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