Department of Psychology and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2013 Dec;8(8):863-9. doi: 10.1093/scan/nst004. Epub 2013 Jan 12.
Brief periods of unconscious thought (UT) have been shown to improve decision making compared with making an immediate decision (ID). We reveal a neural mechanism for UT in decision making using blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) functional magnetic resonance imaging. Participants (N = 33) encoded information on a set of consumer products (e.g. 48 attributes describing four different cars), and we manipulated whether participants (i) consciously thought about this information (conscious thought), (ii) completed a difficult 2-back working memory task (UT) or (iii) made an immediate decision about the consumer products (ID) in a within-subjects blocked design. To differentiate UT neural activity from 2-back working memory neural activity, participants completed an independent 2-back task and this neural activity was subtracted from neural activity occurring during the UT 2-back task. Consistent with a neural reactivation account, we found that the same regions activated during the encoding of complex decision information (right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and left intermediate visual cortex) continued to be activated during a subsequent 2-min UT period. Moreover, neural reactivation in these regions was predictive of subsequent behavioral decision-making performance after the UT period. These results provide initial evidence for post-encoding unconscious neural reactivation in facilitating decision making.
短暂的无意识思维（UT）已被证明可以改善决策，而不是立即做出决策（ID）。我们使用血氧水平依赖（BOLD）功能磁共振成像来揭示决策中 UT 的神经机制。参与者（N=33）对一组消费品（例如，描述四辆不同汽车的 48 个属性）进行信息编码，我们操纵参与者是否（i）有意识地思考这些信息（有意识的思维），（ii）完成困难的 2 背工作记忆任务（UT），或（iii）在一个主体内块设计中立即对消费品做出决定（ID）。为了将 UT 神经活动与 2 背工作记忆神经活动区分开来，参与者完成了一个独立的 2 背任务，并且从在 UT 2 背任务期间发生的神经活动中减去了这种神经活动。与神经再激活的解释一致，我们发现，在复杂决策信息编码期间激活的相同区域（右侧背外侧前额叶皮层和左侧中间视觉皮层）在随后的 2 分钟 UT 期间继续被激活。此外，这些区域的神经再激活可以预测 UT 期后的后续行为决策表现。这些结果为促进决策的后编码无意识神经再激活提供了初步证据。
