Please activate JavaScript!
Please install Adobe Flash Player, click here for download

Foeschungszentrum Jülich - Research in Jülich 1_2013

13 surveys,” says Svenja Caspers. She and her team wanted to know more and asked 35 executives from different sec- tors and a control group of non-manage- rial employees to make decisions. While the participants were working on this task, the researchers observed which areas of the brain were particularly active during the decision-making process by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). DECISIONS WITHIN SECONDS “The test subjects had to choose a concept from a word pair such as ‘team- work’ and ‘success’, ‘power’ and ‘loyal- ty’, or ‘diligence’ and ‘competence’ with- in two seconds,” says the researcher. Altogether, they had to make 540 deci- sions within 22 minutes. The volunteers were asked to make a quick, spontane- ous decision on which word they pre- ferred – there were no wrong or right answers. This appears to be an easy task, but it actually requires the brain to process a considerable quantity of information within a few milliseconds: symbols appear, and in a flash, the brain decides whether these are letters and if so, whether they form words. What’s the con- tent of these words and what do they mean to me? “The concepts then have to be weighed against each other and the participant must decide which of them they Whether quick decisions are also good decisions is a question that was left unanswered in the study by Jülich researcher Dr. Dr. Svenja Caspers. prefer,” says Svenja Caspers, describing the situation. A well-trained neuronal network will tackle the task systematically: visual and acoustic information is processed in dif- ferent regions of the brain, the prefron- tal cortex receives signals from these regions, processes them, and relates them to existing knowledge. The so- called ‘caudate nucleus’ collects pat- terns of action from the past and auto- matically recalls them in similar situations. This helps to speed up the decision-making process, which is con- venient when someone is repeatedly confronted with the same type of deci- sion. “In principle, the structure of the pathways is very similar in all individu- als,” says Svenja Caspers. “It’s not that in some of us, these networks are not used at all. However, the focus of the network, where most of the activity takes place, may shift.” For example, the current study revealed that in the brain of non-executives, the decision-making process was a successive one that in- volved many different areas of the brain. In executives with managerial responsi- bilities, in contrast, the caudate nucleus was particularly active. At the same time, this group also took faster deci- sions. At the moment, the assumption that over the years, executives train themselves to make ‘fast-track’ deci- sions by falling back on their caudate nucleus is nothing but a hypothesis. “This can only be investigated as part of a long-term study,” says Svenja Caspers, and adds, “It also remains to be clarified whether such differences in the use of different brain areas can also be ob- served in more complex decision-making scenarios, for example in strategy devel- opment processes.” :: Brigitte Stahl-Busse RESEARCH AT THE CENTRE | Neuroeconomics 1|2013 Research in Jülich Institute Publication

Pages