Tsetsos Konstantinos, Wyart Valentin, Shorkey S Paul, Summerfield Christopher
Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.
Elife. 2014 Oct 21;3:e03701. doi: 10.7554/eLife.03701.
Neurobiologists have studied decisions by offering successive, independent choices between goods or gambles. However, choices often have lasting consequences, as when investing in a house or choosing a partner. Here, humans decided whether to commit (by acceptance or rejection) to prospects that provided sustained financial return. BOLD signals in the rostral medial prefrontal cortex (rmPFC) encoded stimulus value only when acceptance or rejection was deferred into the future, suggesting a role in integrating value signals over time. By contrast, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) encoded stimulus value only when participants rejected (or deferred accepting) a prospect. dACC BOLD signals reflected two decision biases-to defer commitments to later, and to weight potential losses more heavily than gains-that (paradoxically) maximised reward in this task. These findings offer fresh insights into the pressures that shape economic decisions, and the computation of value in the medial prefrontal cortex.
神经生物学家通过提供在商品或赌博之间连续、独立的选择来研究决策。然而，选择往往会产生持久的后果，比如投资房产或选择伴侣时。在此，研究人员让人类决定是否（通过接受或拒绝）选定那些能带来持续经济回报的前景。只有当接受或拒绝被推迟到未来时，喙内侧前额叶皮层（rmPFC）中的血氧水平依赖（BOLD）信号才对刺激价值进行编码，这表明该脑区在随时间整合价值信号方面发挥作用。相比之下，背侧前扣带皮层（dACC）只有在参与者拒绝（或推迟接受）某个前景时才对刺激价值进行编码。dACC的BOLD信号反映了两种决策偏差——将承诺推迟到以后，以及对潜在损失的重视程度高于收益——而这（看似矛盾地）在此任务中使奖励最大化。这些发现为塑造经济决策的压力以及内侧前额叶皮层中的价值计算提供了新的见解。
