Exploring the Role of Posterior Parietal Cortex in Risky Choice

Student: Kolotilova Daria

Faculty: Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience

Educational Programme: Cognitive Sciences and Technologies: From Neuron to Cognition (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2019

Decision making in everyday life is often characterized by need to face with tradeoffs between uncertain risks and rewards. According to behavioral economics, risky components are contained in how people perceive probabilities of outcomes realization (Kahneman & Tversky, 1992; Gonzalez & Wu, 1999; Prelec, 1998; Lattimore et al.,1992) and how people perceive values (Von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1947). Changes in both of them can affect risk-taking behavior. In our research, we aim to down-regulate both the right Intraparietal Sulcus (r IPS) and the Left Intraparietal Sulcus (l IPS) to investigate how perception of values and probabilities and, as a result, risk-taking behavior change. We found statistically significant changes in both components of risk behavior. Perception of value that is influenced by the individual risk factor r changed after the stimulation of both rIPS and lIPS. Risk-factor increased, participants became more risk-averse. Significant changes in perception of probabilities occurred after the stimulation of left IPS.

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