London, November 10 : An international team of researchers has found that simple decision-making tasks do not involve the brain’s frontal lobes, where many of the higher aspects of human cognition like self-awareness are thought to originate.
The team led by scientists from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and Italy’s University of Chieti instead says that the regions that decide are the same brain regions that receive stimuli relevant to the decision and control the body''s response to it.
While the same principle has been shown in primates, some researchers still believe that the brain has a general decision-making module that involves the frontal lobe independently of the neural systems for perception and action.