Decision-making: Theoretical aspects, neuroanatomy, and assessment
Type de matériel :
11
Making decisions according to our own interests or those of our relatives constitutes a complex faculty that is indispensable for adaptation and autonomy. We exercise this faculty daily in many areas of everyday life such as finance, health care, housing, or employment. In this article, we offer an overview of the knowledge on decision-making, mostly based on the current studies made in this domain. After a few conceptual reminders, primarily based on work done in the field of cognitive psychology, we take a look at the contributions of neurosciences to our understanding of the mechanisms of decision-making. We focus on the role of cognition and emotions in decision-making, on the brain structures involved in decision-making, as well as on the accessible assessment paradigms of decision-making. This overview shows that while the psychological mechanisms and the brain regions involved in decision-making are numerous and better known today, many uncertainties remain concerning the tools useful for understanding decision-making impairments in brain-damaged patients. An important experimental work should be done in this field, given that it is essential, in terms of research, in order to refine, validate, or invalidate the available theoretical propositions on decision-making and, clinically, to better understand the difficulties for brain-damaged patients in a critical area for daily autonomy. We hope that this overview will provide a useful insight into an area that is still largely unexplored in human neuropsychology.
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