Singletary Nicholas M, Horga Guillermo, Gottlieb Jacqueline
Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Department of Neuroscience, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Commun Biol. 2024 Oct 2;7(1):1242. doi: 10.1038/s42003-024-06927-7.
When making adaptive decisions, we actively demand information, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms of active information gathering. An open question is how the brain prospectively estimates the information gains that are expected to accrue from various sources by integrating simpler quantities of prior certainty and the reliability (diagnosticity) of a source. We examine this question using fMRI in a task in which people placed bids to obtain information in conditions that varied independently in the rewards, decision uncertainty, and information diagnosticity. We show that, consistent with value of information theory, the participants' bids are sensitive to prior certainty (the certainty about the correct choice before gathering information) and expected posterior certainty (the certainty expected after gathering information). Expected posterior certainty is decoded from multivoxel activation patterns in the posterior parietal and extrastriate cortices. This representation is independent of instrumental rewards and spatially overlaps with distinct representations of prior certainty and expected information gains. The findings suggest that the posterior parietal and extrastriate cortices are candidates for mediating the prospection of posterior probabilities as a key step to anticipating information gains during active gathering of instrumental information.
在做出适应性决策时，我们会主动寻求信息，但对于主动信息收集的机制却知之甚少。一个悬而未决的问题是，大脑如何通过整合先验确定性的简单量值和信息源的可靠性（诊断性），前瞻性地估计从各种信息源预期获得的信息增益。我们在一项功能性磁共振成像（fMRI）任务中研究了这个问题，在该任务中，人们在奖励、决策不确定性和信息诊断性独立变化的条件下出价获取信息。我们发现，与信息价值理论一致，参与者的出价对先验确定性（收集信息前对正确选择的确定性）和预期后验确定性（收集信息后预期的确定性）敏感。预期后验确定性是从顶叶后部和纹外皮层的多体素激活模式中解码出来的。这种表征独立于工具性奖励，并且在空间上与先验确定性和预期信息增益的不同表征重叠。这些发现表明，顶叶后部和纹外皮层可能是介导后验概率预期的部位，这是在主动收集工具性信息过程中预测信息增益的关键步骤。
