Ambiguity and conflict: Dissecting uncertainty in decision-making

Abstract

Making decisions is fundamental to how we navigate, survive, and thrive in our environment. The quality of information used to support decisions is rarely perfect. Many decisions are made under conditions of uncertainty, arising from ambiguous or conflicting information. Conflict and ambiguity, though conceptually distinct, both generate uncertainty, a commonality that has led to overlapping and inconsistent terminology in the literature. Evidence from human and animal research suggests a behavioral dissociation in responding to conflict and ambiguity. This dissociation can be studied through the implementation of spatial or operant tasks in rodents which find close parallels in gambling tasks in humans. Pharmacological manipulations in rodents and fMRI studies in humans further suggest a dissociation in the neural processing of conflict and ambiguity such that fronto-striato-parietal circuits may be most important for interpreting ambiguous information, while the ventral striatum and ventral hippocampus are critical for resolving conflicting information. Overall, the neural representation and resolution of conflict and ambiguity remain relatively understudied despite the fundamental importance of these processes to understanding decision-making. We highlight the need for further research to differentiate these related yet distinct processes through implementation of carefully designed behavioral tasks with neural circuit-dissection techniques and the potential to pursue translational research between rodents and humans. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).