Serial, as opposed to parallel, insular-prefrontal cortex processing determines the tendency to make risky decisions

Adaptive decision-making under ambiguity requires constant integration of reward- and loss-related information to guide behaviour. In humans and rodents, not all individuals maximise gains in decision-making tasks, such as the Iowa Gambling task or its rodent version, the Rat Gambling task (rGT). While the prefrontal and insular cortices have each been shown independently to support optimal probabilistic decision-making, how they interact functionally to shape individual differences in performance remains unclear. Here, we investigated the consequences of bilateral baclofen/muscimol-mediated inactivation of the prelimbic cortex (PLC) or the anterior insular cortex (AIC) vs. their functional