|
|
|
Predicting emotional reactionsPredicting emotional reactionsPredicting emotional reactions: Mechanisms, bias and choice Tali Sharot, UCL, London In:- Neuroscience of Preference and Choice – Eds:- Dolan, R. & Sharot, T. Keywords: preference, choice, emotion, consciousness, caudate nucleus, basal ganglia The author examines the extent to which choices of behaviour emerge from the emotional system. It is stressed that this does not necessarily refer to immediate emotions but also to anticipated emotions. The process of how emotions are anticipated is therefore argued to be important for the process of choice. The faculty of imagination is seen as being adaptive in this respect. It allows different future scenarios to be viewed, and the emotions generated by these can be used to choose between different courses of action. Brain structures imagining the future overlap with those structures involved in remembering the past. Thus patients with problems in recalling memory due to damage in the hippocampal and frontal regions also have difficulty in imagining future scenarios. It has even been suggested that imagination of future scenarios rather than recall of past events is the core adaptive reason for these brain systems. Imagination of future events appears to involve the medial temporal lobe, some frontal areas and the caudate nucleus in the basal ganglia. Increased activity in the caudate nucleus is associated with the anticipation of rewards, and where there is a choice of rewards, the greatest activity correlates with the reward eventually chosen. Activity in the caudate nucleus also correlates to the imagination of unpleasant or punishing outcomes. The caudate nucleus is also one of the main targets for dopamine, the neuromodulator most related to reward learning and reward seeking, and in the signalling of errors in predicting rewards. It is argued here to be related to subjective estimation of future reward in the case of imagined future scenarios. A large body of evidence is indicated to contradict the earlier idea that dopamine acted directly as a neurotransmitter of reward. It is instead argued to strengthen the link between an imagined stimuli and a pleasurable reaction. |
| Email: quantum-mind@blueyonder.co.uk Copyright © Quantum Mind 2012. Web design by 7Soft.co.uk. |