Nervous System Physiology

Which of these decisions does not require a person to use both the networks involved in decision making in the brain?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Every day, we face thousands of decisions both major and minor — from whether to eat that decadent chocolate cupcake to when to pursue a new romantic relationship or to change careers. How does the brain decide? A new study suggests that it relies on two separate networks to do so: one that determines the overall value — the risk versus reward — of individual choices and another that guides how you ultimately behave.
“Cognitive control and value-based decision-making tasks appear to depend on different brain regions within the prefrontal cortex,” says Jan Glascher, lead author of the study and a visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, referring to the seat of higher-level reasoning in the brain.
Study co-author Ralph Adolphs, a professor of psychology at Caltech, explains the distinction by way of a grocery shopping example: “Your valuation network is always providing you with information about what’s rewarding around you — the things you want to buy — but also lots of distracting things like junk food and other items popping into your vision off the shelves.”
Cognitive control is what keeps this network in check. “To be able to get to the checkout counter with what you planned, you need to maintain a goal in mind, such as perhaps only buying the salad you needed for dinner,” says Adolphs. “That’s your cognitive control network maintaining an overall goal despite lots of other information”.
Understanding how the brain parcels out specific decision-making tasks can offer insight into conditions in which such networks go awry, such as in the case of psychiatric disorders. Depressed people, for example, clearly have difficulty with value-based decision making: because nothing feels good or seems appealing, all options appear equally bleak and making choices becomes impossible. Hoarding disorder, in contrast, may involve overvaluation of certain possessions and impairment of the cognitive control needed to shift one’s attention away from them. That explains why hoarding becomes more important than other life goals like maintaining relationships.
To tease out the distinct roles of these brain areas, the researchers analyzed data on nearly 350 people with damage, or lesions, in specific regions of the frontal lobes believed to be involved with particular tasks. Such studies of brain lesions are better at helping scientists understand cause and effect than imaging studies alone: if a damaged region is linked with impairment on a particular cognitive test, you know that task requires involvement from that region; with imaging studies, however, researchers can never be sure whether brain activity in certain regions is crucial to the task at hand, or whether it resulted from extraneous factors like a participant being distracted in the scanner.

Which of these options, if true, weakens the argument that studies on brain damaged patients are useful?

Directions: Answer the given question based on the following passage:

Every day, we face thousands of decisions both major and minor — from whether to eat that decadent chocolate cupcake to when to pursue a new romantic relationship or to change careers. How does the brain decide? A new study suggests that it relies on two separate networks to do so: one that determines the overall value — the risk versus reward — of individual choices and another that guides how you ultimately behave.
“Cognitive control and value-based decision-making tasks appear to depend on different brain regions within the prefrontal cortex,” says Jan Glascher, lead author of the study and a visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, referring to the seat of higher-level reasoning in the brain.
Study co-author Ralph Adolphs, a professor of psychology at Caltech, explains the distinction by way of a grocery shopping example: “Your valuation network is always providing you with information about what’s rewarding around you — the things you want to buy — but also lots of distracting things like junk food and other items popping into your vision off the shelves.”
Cognitive control is what keeps this network in check. “To be able to get to the checkout counter with what you planned, you need to maintain a goal in mind, such as perhaps only buying the salad you needed for dinner,” says Adolphs. “That’s your cognitive control network maintaining an overall goal despite lots of other information”.
Understanding how the brain parcels out specific decision-making tasks can offer insight into conditions in which such networks go awry, such as in the case of psychiatric disorders. Depressed people, for example, clearly have difficulty with value-based decision making: because nothing feels good or seems appealing, all options appear equally bleak and making choices becomes impossible. Hoarding disorder, in contrast, may involve overvaluation of certain possessions and impairment of the cognitive control needed to shift one’s attention away from them. That explains why hoarding becomes more important than other life goals like maintaining relationships.
To tease out the distinct roles of these brain areas, the researchers analyzed data on nearly 350 people with damage, or lesions, in specific regions of the frontal lobes believed to be involved with particular tasks. Such studies of brain lesions are better at helping scientists understand cause and effect than imaging studies alone: if a damaged region is linked with impairment on a particular cognitive test, you know that task requires involvement from that region; with imaging studies, however, researchers can never be sure whether brain activity in certain regions is crucial to the task at hand, or whether it resulted from extraneous factors like a participant being distracted in the scanner.