Behavioral and Neural Sciences Program, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA.
Department of Psychology, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2019 Dec 17;29(12):5049-5060. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhz045.
The ability to perceive and exercise control over an outcome is both desirable and beneficial to our well-being. It has been shown that animals and humans alike exhibit behavioral bias towards seeking control and that such bias recruits the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and striatum. Yet, this bias remains to be quantitatively captured and studied neurally. Here, we employed a behavioral task to measure the preference for control and characterize its neural underpinnings. Participants made a series of binary choices between having control and no-control over a game for monetary reward. The mere presence of the control option evoked activity in the ventral striatum. Importantly, we manipulated the expected value (EV) of each choice pair to extract the pairing where participants were equally likely to choose either option. The difference in EV between the options at this point of equivalence was inferred as the subjective value of control. Strikingly, perceiving control inflated the reward value of the associated option by 30% and this value inflation was tracked by the vmPFC. Altogether, these results capture the subjective value of perceived control inherent in decision making and highlight the role of corticostriatal circuitry in the perception of control.
感知和控制结果的能力既符合我们的期望，也有益于我们的幸福。事实表明，动物和人类都表现出寻求控制的行为偏见，而这种偏见会招募腹内侧前额叶皮层（vmPFC）和纹状体。然而，这种偏见仍然需要在数量上进行捕捉和神经研究。在这里，我们采用行为任务来衡量对控制的偏好，并描述其神经基础。参与者在一系列金钱奖励的游戏中进行了一系列二元选择，以确定他们是否对游戏有控制权。仅仅存在控制选项就会引起腹侧纹状体的活动。重要的是，我们操纵了每个选择对的预期价值（EV），以提取参与者同样可能选择任一选项的配对。在这一点上，选项之间的 EV 差异被推断为控制的主观价值。引人注目的是，感知控制使相关选项的奖励价值膨胀了 30%，而 vmPFC 则跟踪了这种价值膨胀。总之，这些结果捕捉到了决策中固有的感知控制的主观价值，并强调了皮质纹状体回路在控制感知中的作用。
