Blanchard Tommy C, Hayden Benjamin Y, Bromberg-Martin Ethan S
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.
Neuron. 2015 Feb 4;85(3):602-14. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2014.12.050. Epub 2015 Jan 22.
Decision makers are curious and consequently value advance information about future events. We made use of this fact to test competing theories of value representation in area 13 of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). In a new task, we found that monkeys reliably sacrificed primary reward (water) to view advance information about gamble outcomes. While monkeys integrated information value with primary reward value to make their decisions, OFC neurons had no systematic tendency to integrate these variables, instead encoding them in orthogonal manners. These results suggest that the predominant role of the OFC is to encode variables relevant for learning, attention, and decision making, rather than integrating them into a single scale of value. They also suggest that OFC may be placed at a relatively early stage in the hierarchy of information-seeking decisions, before evaluation is complete. Thus, our results delineate a circuit for information-seeking decisions and suggest a neural basis for curiosity.
决策者充满好奇，因此重视有关未来事件的预先信息。我们利用这一事实来检验眶额皮质（OFC）13区价值表征的竞争理论。在一项新任务中，我们发现猴子会可靠地牺牲初级奖励（水）来查看有关赌博结果的预先信息。虽然猴子在做决定时会将信息价值与初级奖励价值整合起来，但OFC神经元没有系统地整合这些变量的倾向，而是以正交方式对它们进行编码。这些结果表明，OFC的主要作用是编码与学习、注意力和决策相关的变量，而不是将它们整合到单一的价值尺度中。它们还表明，在评估完成之前，OFC可能处于信息寻求决策层次结构中相对较早的阶段。因此，我们的结果描绘了一个信息寻求决策的回路，并为好奇心提出了神经基础。
