Research Output

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Publication

Patients recovering from COVID-19 who presented with anosmia during their acute episode have behavioral, functional, and structural brain alterations

2024 , Leonie Kausel , Alejandra Figueroa-Vargas , José Zamorano-abramson , STECHER GUZMAN, XIMENA PATRICIA , Mauricio Aspé-Sánchez , Claudio Román , Patricio Carvajal-Paredes , Victor Márquez-Rodríguez , Patricio Soto-Fernández , Reinaldo Uribe-San-Martín , Gabriela Valdebenito-Oyarzo , Rodrigo Henríquez-Ch , Carla Manterola , SILVA FUENTE ALBA, CLAUDIO SERGIO , Francisco Aboitiz , María Paz Martínez-Molina , Rafael Polania , Pamela Guevara , MUÑOZ VENTURELLI, PAULA ANDREA , SOTO ICAZA, PATRICIA , BILLEKE BOBADILLA, PABLO ERNESTO

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Publication

The parietal cortex has a causal role in ambiguity computations in humans

2024 , Gabriela Valdebenito-Oyarzo , María Paz Martínez-Molina , SOTO ICAZA, PATRICIA , Francisco Zamorano , Alejandra Figueroa-vargas , Josefina Larraín-Valenzuela , Ximena Stecher , César Salinas , Julien Bastin , Antoni Valero-Cabré , Rafael Polania , BILLEKE BOBADILLA, PABLO ERNESTO , Matthew F. S. Rushworth

Humans often face the challenge of making decisions between ambiguous options. The level of ambiguity in decision-making has been linked to activity in the parietal cortex, but its exact computational role remains elusive. To test the hypothesis that the parietal cortex plays a causal role in computing ambiguous probabilities, we conducted consecutive fMRI and TMS-EEG studies. We found that participants assigned unknown probabilities to objective probabilities, elevating the uncertainty of their decisions. Parietal cortex activity correlated with the objective degree of ambiguity and with a process that underestimates the uncertainty during decision-making. Conversely, the midcingulate cortex (MCC) encodes prediction errors and increases its connectivity with the parietal cortex during outcome processing. Disruption of the parietal activity increased the uncertainty evaluation of the options, decreasing cingulate cortex oscillations during outcome evaluation and lateral frontal oscillations related to value ambiguous probability. These results provide evidence for a causal role of the parietal cortex in computing uncertainty during ambiguous decisions made by humans.