Brain's decision hub rewires under uncertainty
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- University of Iowa researchers found the frontoparietal cortex dynamically shifts which brain regions it communicates with during uncertain decisions, rather than uniformly increasing activity.
- The study combined computational modeling with fMRI scans of 38 participants aged 18–35, who learned and then had to relearn color-face-scene pairings to introduce uncertainty.
- Lead researcher Kai Hwang said the network 'does more than simply collect' incoming signals — it filters information and prioritizes what is relevant to the situation at hand.
- The findings could guide research into conditions involving difficulty regulating behavior, including ADHD and schizophrenia, where this integration process may function differently.
- First author Stephanie Leach, a sixth-year graduate student, led the participant experiments and contributed to project design, while Jiefeng Jiang led the computational modeling.
- The paper, "Frontoparietal Hub Connectivity Integrates Information from Multiple Sources," was published in the Journal of Neuroscience and funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Iowa Neuroscience Institute.
Why it matters: The work reframes how scientists understand flexible cognition: hard problems appear to be solved by reorganizing network connections on the fly, not by working harder. This mechanistic detail gives researchers studying ADHD and schizophrenia a concrete integration process to investigate as a possible source of impaired behavioral regulation.
Ask SkimNews
