Distinct neural networks of task engagement and choice response in moral, risky, and ambiguous decision-making: An ALE meta-analysis

Abstract

Moral, risky, and ambiguous decision-making are likely to be characterized by common and distinct cognitive processes and thus show partly overlapping neural correlates. Previously, two different analysis approaches have been used to assess the neural correlates in all three domains: (a) comparing general engagement in an experimental task versus a control task (task engagement) or (b) comparing actual opposite choices made during the experimental task (choice response). Several coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses were performed to delineate consistent activations across experiments of the two analysis categories and the different decision-making domains. Our results show thattask engagementandchoice responsecapture different aspects of salience network involvement and reward-related striatum processing during decision-making. When assessing domains separately, we discovered that moral cues are processed in a multi-modal social cognition network, while risk and ambiguity require engagement of the salience and the frontoparietal attention networks. This is the first meta-analysis to disentangle the two analysis approaches yielding new insight into common and distinct neural correlates of different kinds of decision-making.

Keywords: ambiguity; choice response; decision-making; fMRI; frontoparietal network; morality; risk; salience; social cognition; striatum; uncertainty.