Whether finding your way through an unfamiliar neighborhood to a friend’s house or deciding on a political candidate, your brain is adept at adapting. It can make decisions based on incomplete information and update those decisions based on new information.

The nature of such sophisticated decision making in the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for high-level processing, has been “poorly studied and little understood,” according to Wako Yoshida and Shin Ishii of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Now, however, in an article in the June 1, 2006, Neuron, they describe experiments that enabled them to tease apart how different regions of the cerebral cortex process uncertain information and integrate it into decision making.

In particular, their aim was to analyze subjects’ navigation through a virtual maze, to explore how different cortical regions function in solving “partially observable decision-making problems.”

“In navigation tasks, such as that investigated here, an individual must constantly maintain an estimate as to his/her current location as a guide for deciding the next turn,” they wrote, “but in the absence of incontrovertible a priori information, this estimate is best represented by the subject’s belief. As information is acquired through observation, this belief may become increasingly convincing or alternatively may be discarded in favor of a new one. This is an intuitive way of making estimations that are appropriate for many real-world behaviors, adopted also by a wide variety of intelligent machines.…,” they wrote.

“Our results provide evidence that activity in different regions of the prefrontal cortex reflect critical computational components involved in decision making in uncertain environments,” concluded the researchers. “This fits well with the proposed role of these regions in decision making, which is likely to be crucial in complex real-world environments. We also illustrate the utility of statistical model-based inference and regression in delineating key task parameters that may be represented in spatially distinct brain regions,” they concluded.

More evidence of the brain’s plasticity and ability to adapt.