On the role of behavioural modes during temporally extended decision-making and their neural substrates

Abstract

Everyday decision-making is broader than the types commonly studied in the laboratory. For example, food preference or gambling tasks lack many essential elements of decisions frequently faced by animals and humans alike. Those often require self-organization and temporally extended behaviours, resulting in sequential dependencies, a need to adjust for changing environments and an ability to balance behavioural flexibility with consistent decision-making strategies. Here, we highlight how behavioural modes help achieve adaptive decision-making and distinguish between different sequential behaviours, reasons for changing mode and mechanisms for mode shifts and maintenance. We highlight the potential role of emotions as a mechanism for mode changes and an ability to prioritize different behavioural strategies. We suggest changes in experimental design and analyses that could help understand brain and behaviour in more self-organized contexts, which will be crucial for a better understanding of real-world decision-making and prefrontal cortex function.