Brain activations associated with probability matching

Abstract

Previously, in a simple probability-matching experiment with two split-brain patients that involved having the participant predict which of two events will happen on the next trial, we found that the left hemisphere tended to look for patterns and match the frequency of previous occurrences but not the right hemisphere [Wolford, G., Miller, M. B., & Gazzaniga, M. S. (2000). The left hemisphere's role in hypothesis formation. Journal of Neuroscience, 20(RC64), 1–4]. In this study, we examined those findings in normal subjects using fMRI. Subjects alternated between blocks of trials in which they predicted the location of a stimulus and those in which they detected the location of a stimulus. Previous investigators using similar paradigms reported mostly right hemisphere activations, including activations in the right dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the right lateral parietal lobe. We also found mostly right hemisphere activations, but we found that some of the activations in the dorsolateral prefrontal and parietal cortices were sensitive to individual differences in the tendency to look for patterns in random sequences. Further, we found that, by controlling for the working memory component of the predicting task, all brain activations in the normal brain associated with looking for patterns were related to the task demands of working memory processes underlying probability matching and predicting.