Center for Synaptic Brain Dysfunctions, Institute for Basic Science, Daejeon, Republic of Korea.
Department of Biological Sciences, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Republic of Korea.
Elife. 2021 Apr 20;10:e53045. doi: 10.7554/eLife.53045.
Studies in rats, monkeys, and humans have found action-value signals in multiple regions of the brain. These findings suggest that action-value signals encoded in these brain structures bias choices toward higher expected rewards. However, previous estimates of action-value signals might have been inflated by serial correlations in neural activity and also by activity related to other decision variables. Here, we applied several statistical tests based on permutation and surrogate data to analyze neural activity recorded from the striatum, frontal cortex, and hippocampus. The results show that previously identified action-value signals in these brain areas cannot be entirely accounted for by concurrent serial correlations in neural activity and action value. We also found that neural activity related to action value is intermixed with signals related to other decision variables. Our findings provide strong evidence for broadly distributed neural signals related to action value throughout the brain.
在大鼠、猴子和人类中的研究发现，大脑的多个区域存在动作价值信号。这些发现表明，这些大脑结构中编码的动作价值信号会使选择偏向于更高的预期奖励。然而，之前对动作价值信号的估计可能受到神经活动中的序列相关性以及与其他决策变量相关的活动的影响而被夸大。在这里，我们应用了几种基于置换和替代数据的统计检验来分析从纹状体、额叶皮层和海马体记录的神经活动。结果表明，之前在这些大脑区域中确定的动作价值信号不能完全用神经活动和动作价值的并发序列相关性来解释。我们还发现，与动作值相关的神经活动与其他决策变量相关的信号混合在一起。我们的研究结果为大脑中与动作值相关的广泛分布的神经信号提供了有力的证据。
