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Prof. Matthew Rushworth

Prefrontal and cingulate brain areas for decision-making and social interaction

Our research is concerned with: 1) the operation of neural circuits during decision-making and social interaction; 2) understanding functional interactions between brain areas and the anatomical connections that mediate them.

Our recent work has been concerned with the operation of neural circuits in prefrontal and cingulate cortex during decision-making and social interaction.  We are also interested in understanding functional interactions between brain areas during decision-making and the anatomical connections that mediate such functional interactions.

The work on decision-making has suggested that brain areas in the anterior cingulate sulcus are concerned with the types of choices that are needed during foraging – whether to engage with a potential choice or whether it is better to seek alternative choices elsewhere.  Brain areas in the anterior cingulate gyrus are concerned with the value of social information.

The work on functional interactions during decision-making has often used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in order to manipulate brain activity in one area and a variety of other techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalographic (EEG) recording to measure the consequences in other brain areas.  Measurements of brain activity and functional interactions have then been related to information about anatomical connectivity provided by diffusion weighted imaging (DWI)

Our team

Selected publications