Research from Professor Rob Potter and his collaborators looking at how risk/reward ambiguity affects brain networks has been published in Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience. 

The paper, titled “Approach-avoidance conflict recruits lateral frontoparietal and cinguloinsular networks in a predator-prey game setting,” used an original game similar to Pac-Man to present the participants with non-player characters that were either targets of consistent risk, consistent reward, or the chance of either. 

The findings of the study suggest that in this setting, two areas of the brain work together to decide whether the target is consistent or ambiguous and then based on that, whether to move toward or away from that target. They also found that the distance of the player from the target predicted how these areas activated.  

Written by student Paige Hollowell