Nie Shaozhi, Wang Muzhi, Li Jian, Luo Huan, Zhang Hang
School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences and Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States.
Imaging Neurosci (Camb). 2023 Dec 18;1. doi: 10.1162/imag_a_00047. eCollection 2023.
In human decision-making under risk, loss is typically valued more than the same amount of gain, a behavioral phenomenon known as loss aversion, which suggests that gain and loss are evaluated differently in the brain. Most previous neuroimaging studies focused on the brain regions that show differential responses to losses relative to gains. What is still largely unknown is how the neural processing of gain and loss may unfold in time and drives loss aversion. Here, we designed a gambling task ideal for investigating the temporal course of the valuation process and used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to track human participants' brain activities for valuating gain and loss. Computational modeling of participants' behaviors implies that the gain and loss presented simultaneously can compete for cognitive resources, during which loss signals dominate the valuation process, resulting in loss aversion. Indeed, time-resolved MEG analysis reveals that the evaluation process of loss terminated later for participants with higher loss aversion than those with lower loss aversion, though the gain valuation had similar temporal courses for different participants. These results suggest that the origin of loss aversion may lie in the neural dynamics of loss processing.
在人类面临风险时的决策中，损失通常比同等数量的收益更受重视，这是一种被称为损失厌恶的行为现象，表明大脑对收益和损失的评估方式不同。以往大多数神经影像学研究都集中在那些相对于收益对损失表现出不同反应的脑区。目前仍很大程度上未知的是，收益和损失的神经处理过程如何随时间展开并导致损失厌恶。在此，我们设计了一个理想的赌博任务来研究估值过程的时间进程，并使用脑磁图（MEG）来追踪人类参与者评估收益和损失时的大脑活动。对参与者行为的计算建模表明，同时呈现的收益和损失会争夺认知资源，在此期间损失信号主导估值过程，从而导致损失厌恶。确实，时间分辨MEG分析显示，损失厌恶程度较高的参与者对损失的评估过程比损失厌恶程度较低的参与者结束得更晚，尽管不同参与者对收益的估值具有相似的时间进程。这些结果表明，损失厌恶的根源可能在于损失处理的神经动力学。
