Explore-Exploit Decisions are Distinguishable by Activation in the Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex and the Anterior Cingulate Cortex

Description: Explore-exploit tasks have been used extensively in psychological research, economic research, and neuroscience. Nonetheless, there are significant challenges in generalizing explore-exploit research due to lack of clarity as to the theoretical basis of exploration and exploitation, multitude of independent variables that may modulate the explore-exploit tradeoff, and a lack of behavioral convergence across tasks. Neuroimaging has revealed a multitude of brain regions involved in exploration and exploitation decisions that can provide insight into the mechanisms that modulate these decisions. Identifying whether there are specific patterns of activation for exploration versus exploitation decisions can help clarify theoretically whether these decisions can be assessed as an opponent processing system. Thus, we conducted a coordinate-based meta-analysis using seed-based d mapping (SDM) software. We found consistent activation across tasks, with activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), intraparietal sulcus (IPS), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), and ventral striatum (VS). We followed up this analysis by investigating activation in exploration versus exploitation, where we found activation in the dlPFC and ACC, suggesting that there is some neural evidence for opponent processing theory for explore-exploit decisions. However, when assessing the conjunction of exploration and exploitation decisions, we found activation in the dACC, dmPFC, and AI, suggesting these regions interact together in response to underlying processes when making explore-exploit decisions. Further, exploratory analyses revealed that n-armed bandit versus other tasks was associated with activation in the posterior cingulate cortex. For the reverse contrast of other versus n-armed bandits during exploitation, we found activation in the insula and anterior cingulate cortex. Taken together, we found considerable heterogeneity in brain responses between task types, and that activation in exploration and exploitation is generally more similar than it is different. Nonetheless, finding that the dlPFC and ACC modulate brain responses in exploration and exploitation is encouraging as these regions are most likely candidates for interventions aimed at modulating explore-exploit decisions.