Abstract
Maladaptive risk taking can have severe individual and societal consequences; thus, individual differences are prominent targets for intervention and prevention. Although brain activation has been shown to be associated with individual differences in risk taking, the directionality of the reported brain–behavior associations is less clear. Here, we argue that one aspect contributing to the mixed results is the low convergence between risk-taking measures, especially between the behavioral tasks used to elicit neural functional markers. To address this question, we analyzed within-participant neuroimaging data for two widely used risk-taking tasks collected from the imaging subsample of the Basel–Berlin Risk Study (N = 116 young human adults). Focusing on core brain regions implicated in risk taking (nucleus accumbens, anterior insula, and anterior cingulate cortex), for the two tasks, we examined group-level activation for risky versus safe choices, as well as associations between local functional markers and various risk-related outcomes, including psychometrically derived risk preference factors. While we observed common group-level activation in the two tasks (notably increased nucleus accumbens activation), individual differences analyses support the idea that the presence and directionality of associations between brain activation and risk taking varies as a function of the risk-taking measures used to capture individual differences. Our results have methodological implications for the use of brain markers for intervention or prevention.
Highlights
Many events, trajectories, and transitions central to human life are shaped by the extent to which individuals are risk loving or risk averse, in the domains of health, wealth, and criminal activity (Moffitt et al, 2011)
What do we know about the neural basis of risk taking that may help understand individual differences? Qualitative (Platt and Huettel, 2008; Bjork and Pardini, 2014; Knutson and Huettel, 2015; Samanez-Larkin and Knutson, 2015) and quantitative reviews (Mohr et al, 2010; Wu et al, 2012; Bartra et al, 2013) of studies that have used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine brain function in response to behavioral measures of risk point towards several brain regions of interest, converging in particular on increased activation in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), insula (AIns), and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as key functional correlates of risk taking
We examined the role of the measures used to capture neural and behavioral individual differences in risk taking by focusing on associations between risk-related neural activation and various indices of risk taking
Summary
Trajectories, and transitions central to human life are shaped by the extent to which individuals are risk loving or risk averse, in the domains of health, wealth, and criminal activity (Moffitt et al, 2011). Backed by a recent genome-wide association study that suggested that the genetic basis for domain-general risk taking is predominantly expressed in the brain tissue (Linnér et al, 2019), a prominent approach to understanding and, predicting individual differences in risk taking focuses on neural pathways (Sherman et al, 2018). Qualitative (Platt and Huettel, 2008; Bjork and Pardini, 2014; Knutson and Huettel, 2015; Samanez-Larkin and Knutson, 2015) and quantitative reviews (Mohr et al, 2010; Wu et al, 2012; Bartra et al, 2013) of studies that have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain function in response to behavioral measures of risk point towards several brain regions of interest, converging in particular on increased activation in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), (anterior) insula (AIns), and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as key functional correlates of risk taking. A large-scale term-based metaanalysis of fMRI studies (Yarkoni et al, 2011) points toward increased activation in the NAcc, AIns, and ACC as consistently and preferentially associated with the term “risk taking” (accessed September 5, 2020). Regarding the underlying mechanisms, these regions have been suggested to constitute the core elements of a neural risk matrix (Knutson and Huettel, 2015), the differential activation in which is thought to facilitate the promotion (NAcc in ventral striatum), inhibition (AIns), and control (ACC) of risky choice
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