Common Neural Dysfunction of Economic Decision-making Across Psychiatric Conditions

Adaptive decision-making, which is often impaired in various psychiatric conditions, is essential for well-being. Recent evidence has indicated that decision-making capacity in multiple tasks could be accounted for by latent dimensions, enlightening the question of whether there is a common disruption of brain networks in economic decision-making across psychiatric conditions. Here, we addressed the issue by combining activation/lesion network mapping analyses with a transdiagnostic brain imaging meta-analysis. Our findings indicate that there were transdiagnostic alterations in the thalamus and ventral striatum during the decision or outcome stage of decision-making. The identified regions represent key nodes in a large-scale network, which is composed of multiple heterogeneous brain regions and plays a causal role in motivational functioning. The findings suggest that disturbances in the network associated with emotion- and reward-related processing play a key role in dysfunctions of decision-making observed in various psychiatric conditions. This study provides the first meta-analytic evidence of common neural alterations linked to deficits in economic decision-making.