Whether it’s braving a long line at a trendy new restaurant or just holding out for a few minutes after the movie to see if there’s a post-credits scene, the decision to keep going or quit. depends on specific areas of our brain.
Waiting doesn’t necessarily require self-control. Deciding whether to wait also requires evaluating the value of the potential reward. In an experiment that investigated the waiting times of people with damage to the frontal lobe of the brain, psychologist Joe Cable and his team at the University of Pennsylvania found that subjects with damage to certain areas of the prefrontal cortex were more likely to wait for things. I found it to be low.
“[Our] “Our findings suggest that regions of the frontal cortex make computationally distinct contributions to adaptive persistence,” he and his team wrote in their paper. study It was recently published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
Please wait
Cable looked for subjects with damage to three parts of the prefrontal cortex: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and the anterior insular cortex. Their behavior was compared to both healthy controls and controls with lesions in other parts of the frontal cortex.
The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is involved in behavioral control, memory, and decision making. The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex is even more important when it comes to decision-making. It also plays an essential role in regulating cognition, emotion, and behavior. The anterior insula controls how subjective emotions are processed. The performance of subjects with lesions in these areas was compared not only with healthy controls but also with controls with lesions in other areas of the frontal cortex.
Participants sitting in front of a computer screen were told that a coin would appear on the screen. The coin would increase in value over time and change color as it matured in value. Press the spacebar to sell for a 10 cent reward. Even if your coins are not yet mature, you can press the spacebar to stop the waiting period and make new coins appear. However, I couldn’t miss a dime.
What no one who participated in this experiment knew was that the maturation of the coins followed one of two patterns. In a high persistence pattern, the coin could mature at any time during the 20 seconds, so waiting was the best strategy. Conversely, the persistence-bound alternative would have been optimal to stop waiting after a little over 2 seconds if the coin would not mature by then. Otherwise, it will remain completely unripe for 40 seconds. The test was to earn as much money as possible in 12 minutes.
