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Ready to Face the Future: Brain Mechanisms for Cognitive Flexibility and Exploration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 January 2015

Sylvain Charron  and
Sven Collette
Sven Collette
Affiliation:
Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives, ENS - INSERM U960,29 rue d'Ulm, Paris, France
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Summary

Solving the exploration/exploitation trade-off is a fundamental issue for an organism living in an uncertain and changing environment. This review describes how a stream of cognitive neuroscience studies linked exploratory behaviour to structures in the human prefrontal cortex, then identified the brain mechanisms involved in the online adaptation of behaviour relatively to reward changes, and finally revealed fundamental limitations in the processing of information at the prefrontal level. The experiments and the results we present could particularly be of interest to economists who want to understand how cognitive neuroscience identify key processes in the human brain and shapes our understanding of decision-making.

Dans un environnement incertain et changeant, il est fondamental pour un organisme vivant de résoudre le compromis exploration/exploitation. Cette revue d'articles décrit comment une série d'études en neurosciences cognitives a associé le comportement exploratoire à certaines structures du cortex préfrontal humain, puis a identifié les mécanismes cérébraux impliqués dans l'adaptation du comportement par rapport aux altérations des récompenses et enfin a mis en évidence des limites fondamentales dans le traitement des informations au niveau préfrontal. Les expériences et les résultats que nous présentons peuvent particulièrement intéresser les économistes qui souhaitent comprendre comment les neurosciences cognitives identifient des processus clés à l'œuvre dans le cerveau humain et façonnent notre compréhension de la prise de décision.

Keywords

neuroeconomicsexplorationprefrontal cortexD87D81D83C91neuroéconomieexplorationcortex préfrontalD87D81D83C91
Type
I) Neurocellular Economics
Information
Recherches Économiques de Louvain/ Louvain Economic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 3-4 , December 2012 , pp. 73 - 81
Copyright
Copyright © Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de recherches économiques et sociales 2012 

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