Research Hit: Your Brain on Flexible Decision-Making

New research shows that you brain can jump between standard neural pathways and novel pathways in the same context to change behaviour.

What do you mean change a decision in the same context?

Well there are many situations whereby we actually have multiple options and may decide to go for an alternative behaviour.

An example is that of a footballer taking a penalty. The obvious behaviour is to kick the ball into one of the corners as far away from the goalkeeper as possible. But, for example, a footballer may decide to kick the ball straight ahead pre-empting the dive the goalkeeper inevitably makes.

Isn’t this just second-guessing the goalkeeper?

Yes, but the sensory stimulus is the same but the behaviour is different so this is something fascinating for neuroscientists to study and precisely what Hao Guo et al. in Germany did in primates. There are also many areas in life and business where contexts change our decision — arguably almost everywhere.

And what did they find?

They gave these rhesus monkey a shooting task similar to the footballing situation (shooting a target using hand movement) so they could track…