Earlier today I linked to a Jonah Leher post on food that hooks into the role that dopamine plays in our decision making. Dopamine looms in the neuroscience angle of Jonah's book How We Decide because the chemical's role in cognition is established. Dopamine related genes are often fingered in behavior genetic studies as the causal root of some observed psychological variation. So a new paper in Nature Neuroscience is in perfect position to stand astride the literal slush pile of this research, Prefrontal and striatal dopaminergic genes predict individual differences in exploration and exploitation:
The basal ganglia support learning to exploit decisions that have yielded positive outcomes in the past. In contrast, limited evidence implicates the prefrontal cortex in the process of making strategic exploratory decisions when the magnitude of potential outcomes is unknown. Here we examine neurogenetic contributions to individual differences in these distinct aspects of motivated human ...
