Perkins Aster Q, Rich Erin L
Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America.
Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York, United States of America.
PLoS Biol. 2025 Aug 7;23(8):e3003281. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3003281. eCollection 2025 Aug.
Economic decisions often require weighing multiple dimensions, or attributes. The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is thought to be important for computing the integrated value of an option from its attributes and comparing values to make a choice. Although OFC neurons are known to encode integrated values, evidence for value comparison has been limited. Here, we used a multi-attribute choice task for monkeys (Macaca mulatta) to investigate how OFC neurons integrate and compare multi-attribute options. By representing attributes with separate cues and using eye tracking to measure attention, we demonstrate that OFC neurons encode the value of attended attributes independent of other attributes in the same option. Encoding was negatively weighted by the value of the matching attribute in the other option, consistent with a comparison between like attributes. These results indicate that OFC computes comparisons between attributes rather than integrated values, and does so dynamically, shifting with the focus of attention.
经济决策通常需要权衡多个维度或属性。眶额皮质（OFC）被认为对于根据选项的属性计算其综合价值并比较价值以做出选择很重要。尽管已知眶额皮质神经元会编码综合价值，但价值比较的证据一直有限。在这里，我们使用了一种针对猴子（猕猴）的多属性选择任务，以研究眶额皮质神经元如何整合和比较多属性选项。通过用单独的线索表示属性并使用眼动追踪来测量注意力，我们证明眶额皮质神经元编码被关注属性的价值，而与同一选项中的其他属性无关。编码受到另一选项中匹配属性价值的负加权，这与相似属性之间的比较一致。这些结果表明，眶额皮质计算的是属性之间的比较而非综合价值，并且是动态进行的，会随着注意力焦点的转移而变化。
