www.ohbm-com.com/blog/our-sit...

Secondly, we successfully replicated the behavioural findings of the two previous studies mentioned, but these previous papers did not include any brain imaging data. Here, we introduce quantitative MRI to examine potential links between behaviour and brain structures. Hope this helps! :)

Hi there! Thanks for your interest in our paper :) Firstly, our study is purely correlational, in that we find correlations between brain microstructures and decision-making behaviours. We don't make any claims about causality, and further research would be needed to uncover any causal links.

Find previous studies by Magda and Tobias here:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

Also for the support of our lab @the-ecg.bsky.social , @lundbeckfonden.bsky.social, @erc.europa.eu and CFIN @au.dk 🙏

13/ I am hugely grateful to everyone on the Visceral Mind Project team for their help, and supervision from @micahgallen.com and @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social, without whom this project would not have been possible!

12/ Interestingly, our analyses did not identify correlations in canonical dopaminergic midbrain regions 🤔 This could result from our rigorous regression pipeline with correction for multiple comparisons, which may lead to reduced sensitivity to subtler effects from smaller regions.

11/ Why does this matter? This research highlights potential for future work examining how cortical microstructures differ in individuals suffering from mental health conditions characterised by aberrant decision-making, such as ADHD or anxiety.

10/ Key takeaways 🔑 Our findings suggest that individual differences in decision-making and exploration behaviours may have distinct microstructural foundations in the brain! 🧠

9/ We also found negative correlations between markers of myeloarchitecture in the right postcentral gyrus & right superior parietal lobule, and value-free random exploration in short horizon trials - trials in which exploration is NOT beneficial!

8/ We found greater indices of cortical myelination in right superior frontal brain regions - previously linked to impulsivity - to be strongly associated with increased value-free random exploration in long horizon trials, i.e., trials in which exploration is beneficial! 🧠

7/ We then employed a TFCE-corrected, whole-brain multiple linear regression pipeline to examine how value-free random exploration relates to indices of brain microstructures (figure from Nikolova et al. 2025: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/3...).

6/ Participants also showed greater novelty exploration and greater uncertainty about a bandit’s mean value (prior variance), in long versus short horizon trials, further demonstrating that long horizon trials engendered robust value-free exploratory behaviours.

5/ In line with previous studies led by Magda Dubois and @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social, we found that participants increased their value-free random exploration in trials where exploration is beneficial (long horizon), compared with trials in which exploration is not beneficial (short horizon). 💡

4/ We specifically focused on ‘value-free random exploration’: an exploration strategy which disregards all existing knowledge of the decision space, thus considering all available choices to be equally likely.

3/ To investigate this behaviour, we combined the gamified multi-armed bandit task, Maggie’s Farm, with computational modelling to extract subject-specific parameters of exploration behaviours from 122 healthy human volunteers 🍎