Hunt for George Clooney's face explains how stress affects decisions

Stress can lead to poor decision-making, and people hunting for George Clooney's face could help us understand why. Thackery Brown at Stanford University, California, and his colleagues asked 38 people, with an average age of 23, to navigate looping paths around 12 different virtual towns in a simulated environment. Each town had just a few streets and took about a minute to navigate. The researchers also placed the face of a celebrity – George Clooney, for example – at a point along the route. The team then asked the participants to navigate the simulation again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imagine (fMRI) machine.