Brain Activation in Deciding Ambiguous or Just Plain Risky Things.

Scott Huettel and colleagues at Duke University discovered that people use different areas of their brain when deciding things that are ambiguous and things that are risky.

"We were able to see individual differences in brain activation depending on the person’s preferences or aversions to risk and ambiguity," said Scott Huettel, Ph.D., lead author and a neuroscientist with the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University. "People who preferred ambiguity had increased activation in the prefrontal cortex, and people who preferred risk had increased activation in the parietal cortex. This opens up the possibility that there are specific neural mechanisms for different forms of economic decision making, which is a very exciting idea."

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