Context Matters: Emotional Sensitivity to Probabilities and the Bias for Action in Cancer Treatment Decisions.

Background: Past studies have shown a commission bias for cancer treatment, a tendency to choose active treatment even when watchful waiting is less risky. This bias suggests motivations for action beyond mortality statistics, but recent evidence suggests that individuals differ in their emotional sensitivity to probabilities (ESP), the tendency to calibrate emotional reactions to probability. The current study aims to examine the role of ESP in the commission bias, specifically whether those higher in ESP are more likely to choose watchful waiting when risk probabilities align with that choice.

The role of emotional sensitivity to probability in the decision to choose genetic testing.

While the availability of genetic testing is rapidly increasing, many opt out of testing. The decision to test or not is emotionally charged, and both clinical research and theoretical work in psychology show that in emotional decisions, people often struggle to interpret and utilize risk information. Clinical research on genetic testing uptake also shows that feeling overwhelmed by numeric information may be a deterrent to testing.

Common and unique components of response inhibition revealed by fMRI.

The ability to inhibit inappropriate responses is central to cognitive control, but whether the same brain mechanisms mediate inhibition across different tasks is not known. We present evidence for a common set of frontal and parietal regions engaged in response inhibition across three tasks: a go/no-go task, a flanker task, and a stimulus-response compatibility task. Regions included bilateral anterior insula/frontal operculum and anterior prefrontal, right dorsolateral and premotor, and parietal cortices.

Increased sensitivity in neuroimaging analyses using robust regression.

Robust regression techniques are a class of estimators that are relatively insensitive to the presence of one or more outliers in the data. They are especially well suited to data that require large numbers of statistical tests and may contain outliers due to factors not of experimental interest. Both these issues apply particularly to neuroimaging data analysis.

Switching attention and resolving interference: fMRI measures of executive functions.

Is there a single executive process or are there multiple executive processes that work together towards the same goal in some task? In these experiments, we use counter switching and response inhibition tasks to examine the neural underpinnings of two cognitive processes that have often been identified as potential executive processes: the switching of attention between tasks, and the resolution of interference between competing task responses. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), for both event-related and blocked design tasks, we find evidence for common neural areas across both tasks in bilateral parietal cortex (BA 40), left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC; BA 9), premotor cortex (BA 6) and medial frontal cortex (BA 6/32). However, we also find areas preferentially involved in the switching of attention between mental counts (BA 7, BA 18) and the inhibition of a prepotent motor response (BA 6, BA 10), respectively.