Polanía Rafael, Moisa Marius, Opitz Alexander, Grueschow Marcus, Ruff Christian C
Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research (SNS-Lab), Department of Economics, University of Zurich, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland.
Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University and ETH of Zurich, Zurich 8092, Switzerland.
Nat Commun. 2015 Aug 20;6:8090. doi: 10.1038/ncomms9090.
Which meal would you like today, chicken or pasta? For such value-based choices, organisms must flexibly integrate various types of sensory information about internal states and the environment to transform them into actions. Recent accounts suggest that these choice-relevant processes are mediated by information transfer between functionally specialized but spatially distributed brain regions in parietal and prefrontal cortex; however, it remains unclear whether such fronto-parietal communication is causally involved in guiding value-based choices. We find that transcranially inducing oscillatory desynchronization between the frontopolar and -parietal cortex leads to more inaccurate choices between food rewards while leaving closely matched perceptual decisions unaffected. Computational modelling shows that this exogenous manipulation leads to imprecise value assignments to the choice alternatives. Thus, our study demonstrates that accurate value-based decisions critically involve coherent rhythmic information transfer between fronto-parietal brain areas and establishes an experimental approach to non-invasively manipulate the precision of value-based choices in humans.
你今天想吃哪顿饭，鸡肉还是意大利面？对于这种基于价值的选择，生物体必须灵活地整合有关内部状态和环境的各种类型的感官信息，以便将它们转化为行动。最近的研究表明，这些与选择相关的过程是由顶叶和前额叶皮质中功能专门但空间分布的脑区之间的信息传递介导的；然而，尚不清楚这种额顶叶交流是否因果性地参与指导基于价值的选择。我们发现，经颅诱导额极和顶叶皮质之间的振荡去同步会导致在食物奖励之间做出更不准确的选择，而与之匹配的感知决策则不受影响。计算模型表明，这种外部操纵会导致对选择选项的价值分配不准确。因此，我们的研究表明，准确的基于价值的决策关键涉及额顶叶脑区之间连贯的节律性信息传递，并建立了一种非侵入性地操纵人类基于价值选择精度的实验方法。
