iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

13/ I am hugely grateful to everyone on the Visceral Mind Project team for their help, and supervision from @micahgallen.com, without whom this project would not have been possible! Also for the support of our lab @the-ecg.org, @lundbeckfonden.bsky.social, @erc.europa.eu and @au.dk 🙏

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12/ Interestingly, our analyses did not identify correlations in canonical dopaminergic midbrain regions 🤔 This could result from our rigorous regression pipeline with correction for multiple comparisons, which may lead to reduced sensitivity to subtler effects from smaller regions. 💪

11/ Why does this matter? This research highlights potential for future work examining how cortical microstructures differ in individuals suffering from mental health conditions characterised by aberrant decision-making, such as ADHD or anxiety.

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10/ Key takeaways: Our findings suggest that individual differences in decision-making and exploration behaviours may have distinct microstructural foundations in the brain! 🔑

9/ We also found negative correlations between markers of myeloarchitecture in the right postcentral gyrus & right superior parietal lobule, and value-free random exploration in short horizon trials - trials in which exploration is NOT beneficial!

8/ We found greater indices of cortical myelination in right superior frontal brain regions - previously linked to impulsivity - to be strongly associated with increased value-free random exploration in long horizon trials, i.e., trials in which exploration is beneficial!

7/ We then employed a TFCE-corrected, whole-brain multiple linear regression pipeline to examine how value-free random exploration relates to indices of brain microstructures (figure from Nikolova et al. 2025: www.jneurosci.org/content/45/3...). 🧠

6/ Participants also showed greater novelty exploration and greater uncertainty about a bandit’s mean value (prior variance), in long versus short horizon trials, further demonstrating that long horizon trials engendered robust value-free exploratory behaviours.

5/ In line with previous studies led by Magda Dubois and @tobiasuhauser.bsky.social, we found that subjects increased their value-free random exploration in trials where exploration is beneficial (long horizon), compared with trials in which exploration is not beneficial (short horizon). 👀

4/ We specifically focused on ‘value-free random exploration’: an exploration strategy which disregards all existing knowledge of the decision space, thus considering all available choices to be equally likely.

3/ To investigate this behaviour, we combined the gamified multi-armed bandit task, Maggie’s Farm, with computational modelling to extract subject-specific parameters of exploration behaviours from 122 healthy human volunteers. 🧠

2/ Throughout life, we face decision-making dilemmas such as the exploration-exploitation trade-off. One must choose either the highest-value option (exploitation), or an alternative, lesser-known option which may yield yet greater rewards but at the risk of disappointment (exploration).