How and where does the brain evaluate reward value and effort (cost) to modulate behavior? How does previous experience alter perception and behavior? What are the genetic and environmental contributions to brain function?
Answers
Answer:
The areas involved are the supplementary motor area (SMA), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and putamen. Every action we take involves a cost to us in physical energy, yet studies about decision-making have tended to look at how we weight up external costs like risks or time. However, being unwilling to exert effort is a symptom for a range of mental disorders, so understanding how the brain processes decisions about effort versus reward could provide insights into these conditions. Every action we take involves a cost to us in physical energy, yet studies about decision-making have tended to look at how we weight up external costs like risks or time. Assessment of effort was centred on the SMA and putamen.
After consolidation, long-term memories are stored throughout the brain as groups of neurons that are primed to fire together in the same pattern that created the original experience.
One of the grand challenges faced by neuroscience is to delineate the determinants of interindividual variation in the comprehensive structural and functional connection matrices that comprise the human connectome. At present, this endeavor appears most tractable at the macroanatomic scale, where intrinsic brain activity exhibits robust patterns of synchrony that recapitulate core functional circuits at the individual level. Here, we use a classical twin study design to examine the heritability of intrinsic functional network properties in 101 twin pairs, including network activity (i.e., variance of a network's specific temporal fluctuations) and internetwork coherence (i.e., correlation between networks' specific temporal fluctuations