The brain’s moral cascade: Large-scale brain networks dynamics during norm-guided decision

Moral decision-making can be understood along a continuum of integrative demands, reflecting the need to coordinate personal values with socially normative constraints. This review advances a temporally resolved framework of moral decision that maps increasing cognitive integrative demands onto a structured temporal cascade across three large-scale brain networks. The salience network supports rapid detection of morally relevant cues and early attentional orienting. The central executive network mediates mid-stage arbitration through conflict monitoring, and rule-outcome comparison. The default mode network contributes to later stages by retrieving autobiographical information and internalized norms for reflective, value-based evaluation. This cascade is indexed by temporally distinct electrophysiological signatures. Early affective-salience processing is reflected in rapid ERP modulations (P200, P260) and low-frequency oscillatory (delta, theta) synchronization. The transition to executive arbitration is marked by N200 activity and increases in midfrontal theta power, indexing conflict monitoring and control engagement. Later evaluative processes which track the retrieval of self-relevant information are captured by P300-like/LPP components and sustained oscillatory dynamics (alpha suppression and beta synchronization), reflecting motivational prioritization and the integration of affective and cognitive signals across the decision epoch. Drawing on neuro-imagery and neurostimulation studies, the cascade framework may help to understand how developmental change, psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders differentially affect salience, control, and evaluative stages of moral appraisal. More broadly, the model offers a temporally grounded basis for neuroethical analyses of how neural markers of moral decision-making are interpreted in clinical and forensic contexts.