Risky business: disambiguating ambiguity-related responses in the brain.

O'Neill M, Kobayashi S. Risky business: disambiguating ambiguity-related responses in the brain. J Neurophysiol 102: 645-647, 2009. First published June 10, 2009; doi:10.1152/jn.00406.2009. Previous functional MRI studies reported neural correlates of risk and ambiguity based on behavioral economic theories. A recent study controlled for uncertainty by adding noise to information of an impending aversive event and demonstrated brain areas that did not track the degree of uncertainty: the activation peaked when the degraded information could be restored by cognitive efforts. In this review, we discuss how the variables defined in economics and cognitive psychology frameworks can be dissociated.