Dr Bolton CHAU, Associate Director of the Mental Health Research Centre (MHRC) and Associate Professor in the Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, and his team have discovered the function of the lateral frontopolar cortex (FPI), a brain region unique to humans, hence providing important insight into humans’ capability of generating complex behaviours. The findings have been published in Cell Reports (https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(23)00566-1).
With the use of brain imaging and artificial intelligence, the team determined that the FPI is involved in digesting complex information during the decision-making process. The FPI uses a parallel processing mechanism that decomposes high-dimensional choice information into simpler forms and transfers this simplified information to another region, the posterior cingulate cortex, to guide decision-making.
The team also received funding from the Collaborative Research Fund of the Research Grants Council (RGC) to conduct follow-up studies for three years. These studies aim to investigate the specific information represented in the FPI, develop artificial neural networks to reverse-engineer the FPI, and design effective brain stimulation approaches to modulate the FPI. The studies will be conducted by a team comprising researchers from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University and the University of Oxford, and will leverage the MHRC collaboration platform and the cutting-edge University Research Facility in Behavioral and Systems Neuroscience (UBSN).
