When deciding what to have for dinner, your brain assigns value to many different options. You might settle for the inexpensive, time-efficient leftovers; or the time-intensive home-cooked meal; or possibly the expensive entree at your favorite restaurant.

In these types of every-day decisions, there are complicated factors to weigh. How much do you value the pleasure of eating a food you like, compared to the effort required to get this food, compared to the price in dollars and cents?

“It’s remarkable that the brain can find an acceptable solution that appropriately balances all of those factors,” says Christopher Kovach, postdoctoral research fellow in neurosurgery at the University of Iowa. “In many cases, this is done very quickly and without much effort.”

The brain’s prefrontal cortex is known to be involved in weighing different options. The brain also depends heavily on specific learned strategies to make the best decision in a given situation—a process that’s less well understood. Since decision-making begins with choosing which options and what factors to consider in the first place, the control of attention is critical.

Kovach is examining which parts of the brain are important in making that decision-within-a-decision of where to direct attention.

“Ultimately, I want to be able to use what I learn to improve our understanding of disorders like ADHD, eating disorders, autism, and schizophrenia,” says Kovach, a native of Topeka, Kan.

Kovach conducts his research with patients in the Iowa Neurological Patient Registry, which was established in 1982 and has more than 500 active members with selective forms of damage to one or two defined regions of the brain.

Current research

This summer, Kovach and his fellow researchers at the UI, together with colleagues from the California Institute of Technology and New York University, discovered how a region of the brain helps predict future events from past experiences. The work sheds light on the function of the front-most part of the frontal lobe, known as the frontopolar cortex, an area of the cortex uniquely well developed in humans in comparison with apes and other primates.

Making the best possible decisions in a changing and unpredictable environment is an enormous challenge. Not only does it require learning from past experience, but it also demands anticipating what might happen under circumstances not previously encountered. Past research from the UI Department of Neurology was among the first to show that damage to certain parts of the frontal lobe can cause severe deficits in decision making in rapidly changing environments.

This recent study, published June 19 in the Journal of Neuroscience, involving a rare group of patients with damage to this front-most part of their brains reveals a critical aspect of how this area contributes to decision making.

"We gave the patients four slot machines from which to pick in order to win money. Unbeknownst to the patients, the probability of getting money from a particular slot machine gradually and unpredictably changed during the experiment,” Kovach says. “Finding the strategy that pays the most in the long run is a surprisingly difficult problem to solve, and one we hypothesized would require the frontopolar cortex.”

Contrary to the researchers’ initial expectation, the patients actually did quite well on the task, winning as much money, on average, as healthy control participants.

"But when we compared their behavior to that of subjects with intact frontal lobe, we found they used a different set of assumptions about how the payoffs changed over time," Kovach says. "Both groups based their decisions on how much they had recently won from each slot machine, but healthy comparison subjects pursued a more elaborate strategy, which involved predicting the direction that payoffs were moving based on recent trends. This points toward a specific role for the frontopolar cortex in extrapolating recent trends."

Kovach's colleague and study author Ralph Adolphs, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the California Institute of Technology, adds that the study results “argue that the frontopolar cortex helps us to make short-term predictions about what will happen next—a strategy particularly useful in environments that change rapidly such as the stock market or most social settings.”

The Iowa experience

Kovach earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program of Neuroscience in 2008. He was drawn to the UI for graduate school by the patient registry.

“The lesion registry is one-of-a-kind, and Iowa also is one of only a handful of universities with a research team that records directly from the human brains of neurosurgical patients,” Kovach says. “In fact, I had come to Iowa to attend medical school, but I became more and more interested in cognitive neuroscience.

“Once I decided to get my Ph.D., I took a hiatus from medical school with permission to return upon completing my degree. But after I finished graduate school, I was so focused on continuing research that I decided to forge ahead with an academic career and not return to medical school.”

Kovach has worked with a collection of outstanding mentors at the UI. Matthew Howard, professor of neurosurgery, is his postdoctoral supervisor, while Adolphs was his dissertation advisor and a UI neurology faculty member until 2006. Kovach also works closely with Daniel Tranel, director of the UI’s Neuroscience Graduate Program.

“Ralph is really my role model. He's extraordinarily industrious and never seems to let the stresses that come with being a researcher—the deadlines, grants and uncertainty about funding—dampen his enthusiasm for science, his creativity or his joy in doing what he loves,” Kovach says. “I've always admired Dan for his scientific judgment; he's someone who can strip complicated problems down to their bare essentials and take apart an argument until all of its flaws are plainly exposed. Whenever I have to review a manuscript, my own or someone else's, I ask myself, ‘What would Dan have to say about this.’ I've learned the importance of articulating ideas clearly, precisely, and as simply as possible.

“Matt Howard has taught me the importance of collaboration. He set the example for how to build and orchestrate a globe-encircling network of scientists and physicians working across a range of fields and to focus their efforts on a single scientifically important question. It's no simple feat to maintain focus within such a sprawling group, but Matt makes it look easy.”

Kovach’s postdoctoral appointment will end in one year. He currently is applying for grants that will provide him with the cornerstone in starting his own independent research program.