There is a link to previous studies that have shown that subjects often have biases toward certain decisions and that activity in some brain regions is associated with taking decisions that do not conform with the default strategy (Venkatraman et al., 2009a and Venkatraman et al., 2009b). Individual differences in risk-taking behavior may, in extreme cases, be associated with pathological

gambling (Clark and Limbrick-Oldfield, see more 2013). While pathological gambling may be linked with a baseline change in risk proneness/aversion, our results raise the possibility of a link with individual differences in how decisions are influenced by context. An approach focusing on changing sensitivity to contextual factors such as risk pressure may elucidate aspects of developmental change in risky behavior (Blakemore and Robbins, 2012 and Paulsen et al., 2012). Assaying response strategies with low likelihoods of success but with the potential for delivering great gains may be imperative at some points in adolescence. VmPFC and dACC might constitute two distinct decision-making systems rather than components of a single serial system for decision

making (Boorman et al., 2013, Kolling et al., 2012 and Rushworth et al., 2012). There was evidence that vmPFC and dACC acted in independent, or even opposite, Cabozantinib cell line ways in the current study. Although there has been particular interest in the role that vmPFC plays in valuation and decision making (Boorman et al., 2009, Camille et al., 2011, De Martino et al., 2013, Fellows, 2011, FitzGerald et al., 2009, Hunt et al., Dipeptidyl peptidase 2012, Kolling et al., 2012, Lim et al., 2011, Noonan et al., 2010, Philiastides et al., 2010 and Wunderlich et al., 2012), vmPFC did not mediate the influence of the contextual variable of risk pressure on decision making. Instead, vmPFC became less active as risk bonus increased (Figure 3A). Both lesion and neuroimaging evidence suggest that, in addition to its role in valuation and decision making, vmPFC mediates the repetition of a previously

successful choice or the taking of a default choice (Boorman et al., 2013, Noonan et al., 2012 and Noonan et al., 2010), and the pattern of activity recorded in vmPFC suggests that it was similarly concerned with default responses in the present task. This interpretation is suggested by the following observations. On average, subjects were risk averse and defaulted to taking the safer choice. This was most true on trials in which the risk pressure was low (Figures 1 and 2), and it was on just such trials that vmPFC activity was greatest (Figure 3A). Note that, in this task, default choices occur when decision making is less constrained by context. Instead of vmPFC, both dACC and FPl were preeminent in tracking the risk pressure afforded by the evolving decision context (Figures 4, 5, 6, and 7). FPl and dACC have been coactivated in other studies (Boorman et al., 2011 and Daw et al.