Beyond Yes or No: How the Brain Navigates Between Competing Goals

HOUSTON – (August 2026) – How do we decide what to do next? And how does the brain adapt those decisions as the world around us changes? A new study published in Nature by investigators at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute at Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine offers surprising insights by revealing how the human brain continuously balances competing goals in real time. 

Most research on decision-making has focused on discrete choices, like selecting option A over option B. Real life is rarely that simple. Whether deciding between finishing a project and answering a text, choosing the fastest route home, or balancing competing responsibilities throughout the day, people constantly navigate shifting priorities and changing environments. This study sought to understand how the brain manages these ongoing decisions. 

Co-corresponding authors Dr. Sameer Sheth, director of the Gordon and Mary Cain Pediatric Neurology Research Foundation Laboratories, principal investigator at the Duncan NRI and professor of neurosurgery at Baylor, and Dr. Benjamin Hayden, professor of neurosurgery and McNair Scholar at Baylor, led a multidisciplinary team that included Baylor graduate student Assia Chericoni. Together, they investigated how the brain supports continuous decision-making in situations where people must constantly balance, update, and re-evaluate competing goals. 

To tackle this question, the researchers applied a framework known as compositional control, a concept borrowed from control theory and robotics. In this framework, complex behavior emerges from a dynamic combination of simpler goal-directed strategies, while a higher-level "meta-controller" continuously adjusts the importance of each goal as conditions change. 

The team tested this idea using a joystick-controlled prey-pursuit game in which participants chased virtual targets that differed in speed and reward value. They analyzed behavior and recorded the activity of individual neurons in three brain regions, the hippocampus (HPC), anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), in 19 patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for epilepsy. By combining advanced computational modeling with direct recordings from the human brain, the researchers were able to determine how these regions contribute to real-time decision-making.

What They Found

The researchers discovered that the brain does not simply switch back and forth between competing goals. Instead, it continuously blends and adjusts multiple goal-directed strategies at the same time, much like a GPS system that constantly recalculates a route in response to changing traffic conditions. They call this process compositional control. 

Perhaps most surprising was the role of the hippocampus. Traditionally viewed as a brain region involved primarily in memory , the hippocampus appeared to play an active role in tracking possible future strategies and planning upcoming actions. 

The findings support a three-part framework in which:

• The hippocampus (HPC) estimates current and future task states and helps support planning.
• The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) acts as a meta-controller, monitoring and guiding shifts between goals or behavioral strategies.
• The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) represents the value structure of the environment, providing information about the relative desirability of different options. 

Together, these findings challenge the long-standing view of the hippocampus as a largely passive cognitive map and instead suggest that it plays an active role in guiding behavior as decisions unfold in real time.

Conclusion

The study reveals a coordinated brain network that allows people to navigate competing goals in dynamic environments and elucidates a new role for the hippocampus. While the hippocampus has traditionally been known as the brain’s “memory center”, Chericoni, Hayden, Sheth and colleagues suggest it is actually involved in substantially more active information processing by tracking possible future states and helping to plan future actions.  The hippocampus’ role in decision making is complemented by the anterior cingulate cortex, which helps determine when priorities should change, and the orbitofrontal cortex, which provides information about the value of available options. Together, these regions enable the seamless balancing and updating of goals that allows us to seamlessly navigate moment-to-moment decisions in the complex world around us.

###

This project was supported by NIH grants R01 DA038615, R01 MH125377, U01 NS121472, and R01 MH129439, and by the Gordon and Mary Cain Pediatric Neurology Research Foundation Laboratories and McNair foundation.

For a full list of collaborators please see the publication.