Sleep increases explicit solutions and reduces intuitive judgments of semantic coherence.

Sleep fosters the generation of explicit knowledge. Whether sleep also benefits implicit intuitive decisions about underlying patterns is unclear. We examined sleep's role in explicit and intuitive semantic coherence judgments. Participants encoded sets of three words and after a sleep or wake period were required to judge the potential convergence of these words on a common fourth associate. Compared with wakefulness, sleep increased the number of explicitly named common associates and decreased the number of intuitive judgments. This suggests that sleep enhances the extraction of explicit knowledge at the expense of the ability to make intuitive decisions about semantic coherence.

Intuitive Face Judgments Rely on Holistic Eye Movement Pattern.

Non-verbal signals such as facial expressions are of paramount importance for social encounters. Their perception predominantly occurs without conscious awareness and is effortlessly integrated into social interactions. In other words, face perception is intuitive. Contrary to classical intuition tasks, this work investigates intuitive processes in the realm of every-day type social judgments. Two differently instructed groups of participants judged the authenticity of emotional facial expressions, while their eye movements were recorded: an 'intuitive group,' instructed to rely on their "gut feeling" for the authenticity judgments, and a 'deliberative group,' instructed to make their judgments after careful analysis of the face. Pixel-wise statistical maps of the resulting eye movements revealed a differential viewing pattern, wherein the intuitive judgments relied on fewer, longer and more centrally located fixations. These markers have been associated with a global/holistic viewing strategy. The holistic pattern of intuitive face judgments is in line with evidence showing that intuition is related to processing the "gestalt" of an object, rather than focusing on details. Our work thereby provides further evidence that intuitive processes are characterized by holistic perception, in an understudied and real world domain of intuition research.

Scrutinizing the Emotional Nature of Intuitive Coherence Judgments.

Dual-system models propose that cognitive processing can occur either intuitively or deliberately. Unlike deliberate decision strategies, intuitive ones are assumed to have an emotional component attached to the decision process. We tested if intuitive decisions are indeed accompanied by an emotional response while deliberate decisions are not. Specifically, we conducted a psychophysiological study in which participants were instructed to decide either intuitively or deliberately if three simultaneously presented words were semantically coherent or incoherent (triad task). The degree of emotionality of these two decision strategies (intuitive vs. deliberate) was compared using changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) and the reaction time (RT) effect of an affective priming paradigm as primary measurements. Based on a valence-arousal model, our results revealed that intuitive and deliberate judgments do not differ as to their emotional valence but that they do differ in emotional arousal. Most notably, sympathetic activation during intuitive judgments was significantly lower compared to sympathetic activation during deliberate judgments. Our results reflect that a relaxed state of mind-manifested in low sympathetic activity-could underlie the holistic processing that is assumed to facilitate the proliferation of semantic associations during coherence judgments. This suggests that coherence judgments made under an (instructed) intuitive decision mode have a specific psychophysiological signature and that arousal is the differentiating component between intuitive and deliberate decision strategies.

Intuition and Insight: Two Processes That Build on Each Other or Fundamentally Differ?

Intuition and insight are intriguing phenomena of non-analytical mental functioning: whereas intuition denotes ideas that have been reached by sensing the solution without any explicit representation of it, insight has been understood as the sudden and unexpected apprehension of the solution by recombining the single elements of a problem. By face validity, the two processes appear similar; according to a lay perspective, it is assumed that intuition precedes insight. Yet, predominant scientific conceptualizations of intuition and insight consider the two processes to differ with regard to their (dis-)continuous unfolding. That is, intuition has been understood as an experience-based and gradual process, whereas insight is regarded as a genuinely discontinuous phenomenon. Unfortunately, both processes have been investigated differently and without much reference to each other. In this contribution, we therefore set out to fill this lacuna by examining the conceptualizations of the assumed underlying cognitive processes of both phenomena, and by also referring to the research traditions and paradigms of the respective field. Based on early work put forward by Bowers et al. (1990, 1995), we referred to semantic coherence tasks consisting of convergent word triads (i.e., the solution has the same meaning to all three clue words) and/or divergent word triads (i.e., the solution means something different with respect to each clue word) as an excellent kind of paradigm that may be used in the future to disentangle intuition and insight experimentally. By scrutinizing the underlying mechanisms of intuition and insight, with this theoretical contribution, we hope to launch lacking but needed experimental studies and to initiate scientific cooperation between the research fields of intuition and insight that are currently still separated from each other.

Strategies for memory-based decision making: Modeling behavioral and neural signatures within a cognitive architecture.

How do people use memories to make inferences about real-world objects? We tested three strategies based on predicted patterns of response times and blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) responses: one strategy that relies solely on recognition memory, a second that retrieves additional knowledge, and a third, lexicographic (i.e., sequential) strategy, that considers knowledge conditionally on the evidence obtained from recognition memory. We implemented the strategies as computational models within the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture, which allowed us to derive behavioral and neural predictions that we then compared to the results of a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in which participants inferred which of two cities is larger. Overall, versions of the lexicographic strategy, according to which knowledge about many but not all alternatives is searched, provided the best account of the joint patterns of response times and BOLD responses. These results provide insights into the interplay between recognition and additional knowledge in memory, hinting at an adaptive use of these two sources of information in decision making. The results highlight the usefulness of implementing models of decision making within a cognitive architecture to derive predictions on the behavioral and neural level.

Intuitive decision making as a gradual process: investigating semantic intuition-based and priming-based decisions with fMRI.

INTRODUCTION: Intuition has been defined as the instantaneous, experience-based impression of coherence elicited by cues in the environment. In a context of discovery, intuitive decision-making processes can be conceptualized as occurring within two stages, the first of which comprises an implicit perception of coherence that is not (yet) verbalizable. Through a process of spreading activation, this initially non-conscious perception gradually crosses over a threshold of awareness and thereby becomes explicable. Because of its experiential basis, intuition shares conceptual similarities with implicit memory processes. Based on these, the study addresses two research questions: (1) Is the gradual nature of intuitive processes reflected on a neural level? (2) Do intuition-based decisions differ neurally from priming-based decisions? METHODS: To answer these questions, we conducted an fMRI study using the triads task and presented participants with coherent word triads that converge on a common fourth concept, and incoherent word triads that do not converge on a common fourth concept. Participants had to perform semantic coherence judgments as well as to indicate whether they immediately knew the fourth concept. To enable investigating intuition-based and priming-based decisions within the same task and with the same participants, we implemented a conceptual priming procedure into the coherence judgment task. We realized this by priming participants with concepts associated with incoherent triads in separate priming blocks prior to the coherence judgments. RESULTS: For intuition-based decisions, imaging results mainly revealed activity within the orbitofrontal cortex, within the inferior frontal gyrus and the middle temporal gyrus. Activity suppression in the right temporo-occipital complex was observed for priming-based decisions. CONCLUSIONS: With respect to research question 1, our data support a continuity model of intuition because the two intuitive stages show quantitatively distinct brain activation patterns. Regarding research question 2, we can draw the preliminary conclusion of a qualitative difference between intuition-based and priming-based decisions.

Emotions and Decisions: Beyond Conceptual Vagueness and the Rationality Muddle.

For centuries, decision scholars paid little attention to emotions: Decisions were modeled in normative and descriptive frameworks with little regard for affective processes. Recently, however, an "emotions revolution" has taken place, particularly in the neuroscientific study of decision making, putting emotional processes on an equal footing with cognitive ones. Yet disappointingly little theoretical progress has been made. The concepts and processes discussed often remain vague, and conclusions about the implications of emotions for rationality are contradictory and muddled. We discuss three complementary ways to move the neuroscientific study of emotion and decision making from agenda setting to theory building. The first is to use reverse inference as a hypothesis-discovery rather than a hypothesis-testing tool, unless its utility can be systematically quantified (e.g., through meta-analysis). The second is to capitalize on the conceptual inventory advanced by the behavioral science of emotions, testing those concepts and unveiling the underlying processes. The third is to model the interplay between emotions and decisions, harnessing existing cognitive frameworks of decision making and mapping emotions onto the postulated computational processes. To conclude, emotions (like cognitive strategies) are not rational or irrational per se: How (un)reasonable their influence is depends on their fit with the environment.

Oops, scratch that! Monitoring one's own errors during mental calculation.

The feeling of error (FOE) is the subjective experience that something went wrong during a reasoning or calculation task. The main goal of the present study was to assess the accuracy of the FOE in the context of mental mathematical calculation. We used the number bisection task (NBT) to evoke this metacognitive feeling and assessed it by asking participants if they felt they have committed an error after solving the task. In the NBT participants have to determine whether the number presented in the middle οf a triplet corresponds to the arithmetic mean of the two outer numbers (e.g., 07_16_25) with a Yes/No answer. Our results show that FOE reports were strongly correlated with arithmetic errors and numerical properties of the NBT, suggesting that the FOE accurately represents the error. This finding indicates that even very fast metacognitive feelings are reliable when it comes to evaluating one's own mental performance. Moreover, our results suggest that the occurrence of FOEs is determined by the fluency with which each triplet was solved and the post-decision evaluation processes that occurred after the NBT was solved. Additionally, we asked participants to report their confidence in the given answer for the cases where they did not report FOEs. Participants reported less confidence for the (objectively) incorrect answers than for the (objectively) correct ones, suggesting that in cases where they did not have a conscious FOE they still were able to implicitly detect their errors. Remarkably, confidence was also determined by the fluency of the NBT.

Timing matters! The neural signature of intuitive judgments differs according to the way information is presented.

One can conceive of intuition as the preliminary perception of coherence. Since this requires holistic perception, it is hypothesized that underlying processing strategies are dependent on the possibility to obtain all relevant information at once. The present study used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to investigate neural mechanisms underlying intuitive coherence perception when semantic concepts are presented all together (simultaneously) or one after the other (sequentially). With simultaneous presentation, absolute activation increases in the left OFC when participants recognize coherence. With sequential presentation activation increases in the right OFC when participants conclude that there is no common associate between the words presented. Behavioral performance was similar in the two experiments. These results demonstrate that the way information is revealed over time changes the processing of intuitive coherence perception. We propose that such changes must be taken into account to disentangle the neural and behavioral mechanisms underlying different accounts of intuition and related phenomena.

Do intuitive and deliberate judgments rely on two distinct neural systems? A case study in face processing.

Arguably the most influential models of human decision-making today are based on the assumption that two separable systems - intuition and deliberation - underlie the judgments that people make. Our recent work is among the first to present neural evidence contrary to the predictions of these dual-systems accounts. We measured brain activations using functional magnetic resonance imaging while participants were specifically instructed to either intuitively or deliberately judge the authenticity of emotional facial expressions. Results from three different analyses revealed both common brain networks of activation across decision mode and differential activations as a function of strategy adherence. We take our results to contradict popular dual-systems accounts that propose a clear-cut dichotomy of the processing systems, and to support rather a unified model. According to this, intuitive and deliberate judgment processes rely on the same rules, though only the former are thought to be characterized by non-conscious processing.

The neural basis of deception in strategic interactions.

Communication based on informational asymmetries abounds in politics, business, and almost any other form of social interaction. Informational asymmetries may create incentives for the better-informed party to exploit her advantage by misrepresenting information. Using a game-theoretic setting, we investigate the neural basis of deception in human interaction. Unlike in most previous fMRI research on deception, the participants decide themselves whether to lie or not. We find activation within the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ), the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the (pre)cuneus (CUN), and the anterior frontal gyrus (aFG) when contrasting lying with truth telling. Notably, our design also allows for an investigation of the neural foundations of sophisticated deception through telling the truth-when the sender does not expect the receiver to believe her (true) message. Sophisticated deception triggers activation within the same network as plain lies, i.e., we find activity within the rTPJ, the CUN, and aFG. We take this result to show that brain activation can reveal the sender's veridical intention to deceive others, irrespective of whether in fact the sender utters the factual truth or not.

Feeling before knowing why: the role of the orbitofrontal cortex in intuitive judgments--an MEG study.

In theory, intuitive decisions are made immediately, without conscious, reasoned thought. They are experienced as decisions based on hunches that cannot be explicitly described but, nevertheless, guide subsequent action. Investigating the underlying neural mechanisms, previous research has found the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to be crucial to intuitive processes, but its specific role has remained unclear. On the basis of a two-stage conceptualization of intuition suggested by Bowers, Regehr, Balthazard, and Parker Cognitive Psychology, 22, 72-110 (1990), we attempt to clarify the OFC's role in intuitive processing. We propose that it functions as an early integrator of incomplete stimulus input guiding subsequent processing by means of a coarse representation of the gist of the information. On the subjective level, this representation would be perceived as a (gut) feeling biasing the decision. Our aim in the present study was to test this neural model and rule out alternative explanations of OFC activation in intuitive judgments. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record participants' electromagnetic brain responses during a visual coherence judgment task. As in earlier studies, the OFC was found to be activated when participants perceived coherence. Using MEG, it could be shown that this increase in activation began earlier in the OFC than in temporal object recognition areas. Moreover, the present study demonstrated that OFC activation was independent of physical stimulus characteristics, task requirements, and participants' explicit recognition of the stimuli presented. These results speak to the OFC's fundamental role in the early steps of intuitive judgments and suggest the proposed neural model as a promising starting point for future investigations.

Abnormality, rationality, and sanity.

A growing body of studies suggests that neurological and mental abnormalities foster conformity to norms of rationality that are widely endorsed in economics and psychology, whereas normality stands in the way of rationality thus defined. Here, we outline the main findings of these studies, discuss their implications for experimental design, and consider how 'sane' some benchmarks of rationality really are.

What do I want and when do I want it: brain correlates of decisions made for self and other.

A number of recent functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies on intertemporal choice behavior have demonstrated that so-called emotion- and reward-related brain areas are preferentially activated by decisions involving immediately available (but smaller) rewards as compared to (larger) delayed rewards. This pattern of activation was not seen, however, when intertemporal choices were made for another (unknown) individual, which speaks to that activation having been triggered by self-relatedness. In the present fMRI study, we investigated the brain correlates of individuals who passively observed intertemporal choices being made either for themselves or for an unknown person. We found higher activation within the ventral striatum, medial prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortex, pregenual anterior cingulate cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex when an immediate reward was possible for the observer herself, which is in line with findings from studies in which individuals actively chose immediately available rewards. Additionally, activation in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and precuneus was higher for choices that included immediate options than for choices that offered only delayed options, irrespective of who was to be the beneficiary. These results indicate that (1) the activations found in active intertemporal decision making are also present when the same decisions are merely observed, thus supporting the assumption that a robust brain network is engaged in immediate gratification; and (2) with immediate rewards, certain brain areas are activated irrespective of whether the observer or another person is the beneficiary of a decision, suggesting that immediacy plays a more general role for neural activation. An explorative analysis of participants' brain activation corresponding to chosen rewards, further indicates that activation in the aforementioned brain areas depends on the mere presence, availability, or actual reception of immediate rewards.

Decision-making in polydrug amphetamine-type stimulant users: an fMRI study.

Qualitative poor decision-making and associated altered neuronal activation patterns have been described for the users of several drugs, amongst others for stimulants like amphetamine and MDMA. Deficits in decision-making might be caused by an augmented attraction to short-term rewarding properties despite negative long-term consequences, leading to rigid stimulus-response patterns. In the present imaging study, we investigated decision-making and associated neuronal activation in three groups differing in their exposure to amphetamine and MDMA. An established paradigm on risky choices was used to evaluate decision-making performance and corresponding functional magnet resonance imaging (fMRI) activation. Subjects could choose between a low-risk control gamble and an experimental gamble, which always differed in the probability of winning or losing, as well as the magnitudes of monetary gain or loss. Experienced users (EU), users with low exposure to stimulants and drug-naive controls, did not differ from each other in behavioral performance. In accordance with our hypotheses, the anticipation of reward led to an activation of primarily the frontal cortex and the striatum in low-exposure users and drug-naive controls. In contrast, frontal and parietal activation was observed in all groups when the actual outcome of an experimental gamble was presented. EU displayed more activation compared to both control groups when there was a high probability of winning. The study at hand supports the hypothesis that neuronal activation patterns might even differ between drug users and healthy controls when no behavioral deficits are apparent. In EU, the probability of the occurrence of an event has more influence on neuronal activation than on the actual magnitude of reinforcing properties of this event.

Cognitive Processes in Decisions Under Risk are not the Same as in Decisions Under Uncertainty.

We deal with risk versus uncertainty, a distinction that is of fundamental importance for cognitive neuroscience yet largely neglected. In a world of risk ("small world"), all alternatives, consequences, and probabilities are known. In uncertain ("large") worlds, some of this information is unknown or unknowable. Most of cognitive neuroscience studies exclusively study the neural correlates for decisions under risk (e.g., lotteries), with the tacit implication that understanding these would lead to an understanding of decision making in general. First, we show that normative strategies for decisions under risk do not generalize to uncertain worlds, where simple heuristics are often the more accurate strategies. Second, we argue that the cognitive processes for making decisions in a world of risk are not the same as those for dealing with uncertainty. Because situations with known risks are the exception rather than the rule in human evolution, it is unlikely that our brains are adapted to them. We therefore suggest a paradigm shift toward studying decision processes in uncertain worlds and provide first examples.

What is for me is not for you: brain correlates of intertemporal choice for self and other.

People have present-biased preferences: they choose more impatiently when choosing between an immediate reward and a delayed reward, than when choosing between a delayed reward and a more delayed reward. Following McClure et al. [McClure, S.M., Laibson, D.I., Loewenstein, G., Cohen, J.D. (2004). Separate neural systems value immediate and delayed monetary rewards. Science, 306, 503.], we find that areas in the dopaminergic reward system show greater activation when a binary choice set includes both an immediate reward and a delayed reward in contrast to activation measured when the binary choice set contains only delayed rewards. The presence of an immediate reward in the choice set elevates activation of the ventral striatum, pregenual anterior cingulate cortex and anterior medial prefrontal cortex. These dopaminergic reward areas are also responsive to the identity of the recipient of the reward. Even an immediate reward does not activate these dopaminergic regions when the decision is being made for another person. Our results support the hypotheses that participants show less affective engagement (i) when they are making choices for themselves that only involve options in the future or (ii) when they are making choices for someone else. As hypothesized, we also find that behavioral choices reflect more patience when choosing for someone else.

It just felt right: the neural correlates of the fluency heuristic.

Simple heuristics exploit basic human abilities, such as recognition memory, to make decisions based on sparse information. Based on the relative speed of recognizing two objects, the fluency heuristic infers that the one recognized more quickly has the higher value with respect to the criterion of interest. Behavioral data show that reliance on retrieval fluency enables quick inferences. Our goal with the present functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to isolate fluency-heuristic-based judgments to map the use of fluency onto specific brain areas that might give a better understanding of the heuristic's underlying processes. Activation within the claustrum for fluency heuristic decisions was found. Given that claustrum activation is thought to reflect the integration of perceptual and memory elements into a conscious gestalt, we suggest this activation correlates with the experience of fluency.

How the orbitofrontal cortex contributes to decision making - a view from neuroscience.

In the present contribution, the various functional interpretations concerning the putative function of the orbital prefrontal cortex are reviewed since this region and adjacent areas are considered the neural substrate of social behavior in general, and decision-making behavior in particular. This literature review revealed different but related interpretations as to the function of the orbital prefrontal cortex (including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC)): the orbital prefrontal areas (a) code the hedonic quality of choice options, (b) are critical for maintaining associative information about expected outcomes in representational memory so that it can be compared and integrated with information about internal states and current goals, (c) serve as a store of implicitly acquired linkages between factual knowledge and bio-regulatory states, including those that constitute feelings and emotions, (d) serve as a detector of potential content that is derived from the critical aspects of the input, that is, the gist information, (e) are crucially involved in the integration of emotional signals in the decision-making process, and (f) may specialize in integrating the external and internal environment. In the last part of this contribution, we try to bring together these varying but related approaches and propose a preliminary working hypothesis with regard to the role of orbital prefrontal areas in decision making.