Researchers at SIDB (University of Edinburgh) and Princeton University have discovered that when making decisions, individuals have differences in neural activity in the brain’s frontal cortex, which plays a crucial role in decision-making. The research, led by Dr Marino Pagan, Group Leader at SIDB, could have implications for personalised medicine, as treatments for cognitive impairments might need to be tailored to an individual’s unique way of processing information.
The study, published in Nature, outlines how the researchers trained rats on a task requiring them to switch between decision-making rules and recorded their neural activity. Even though they performed equally well, their brains used different computational mechanisms to reach the same answer. This variability had not been well studied before, as most neuroscience research focuses on what is common across individuals rather than what is different.
