What it is
Deciding between competing urges to approach and to avoid is thought to emerge from coordinated activity across brain networks. The authors ran a functional network analysis of brain-wide neural activity generated by learned motivational conflict in both humans and rats. The anterior hippocampus in humans and the ventral hippocampus in rats occupied highly central, hub-like positions and were highly integrated with other functional communities; the insula, particularly the posterior insula in rats, also emerged as a putative cross-species hub, and network topology shifted with individual differences and sex in conflict preference.
Why it matters
Human and rodent studies had separately identified candidate hubs for approach-avoidance conflict, namely the anterior (ventral) hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, but a cross-species account of the network dynamics behind learned conflict processing had not been demonstrated. The authors set out to bridge that translational gap, and their results provide evidence for conserved network dynamics, particularly at the regional scale.
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Filed underMemory and Neural Mechanisms, Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies, Action Observation and Synchronization