Medial Frontal Cortex Activity Predicts Information Sampling in Economic Choice.
Medial Frontal Cortex Activity Predicts Information Sampling in Economic Choice.
复制标题
内侧额叶皮层活动预测经济选择中的信息采样。
DOI：
10.1523/jneurosci.0392-21.2021
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发表时间：
2021-10-06
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Hunt L
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kaanders P;Nili H;O'Reilly JX;Hunt L
决策不仅要求代理人决定选择什么，还要求他们在做出选择之前采样多少信息。以前建立的经济选择框架主张一个跨越时间的证据积累的审慎过程。这些实验默认了信息抽样的作用，因为只有在获得充分证据的情况下才会做出决定，但很少有实验明确地将信息抽样置于参与者的控制之下。在这里，我们通过允许参与者（n=30，性别未记录）在多步骤决策任务中主动采样信息，使用功能性MRI来研究经济选择中信息采样的神经基础。我们表明，内侧额叶皮层（MFC）的活动是预测进一步的信息采样之前的选择。选择难度（值差的反比，保持感官难度不变）也在MFC中被编码，但这一影响可以通过在一般线性模型中包含信息采样作为协回归因子来解释。一个分布在前额叶皮层的区域网络编码了采样信息呈现时的关键特征。我们认为，在做出经济选择之前，MFC是信息收集程度的重要控制因素。这一作用可以解释为什么在以前的研究中，MFC活动与证据积累有关，在这些研究中，信息抽样是决策的隐性特征，而不是显性特征。
Decision-making not only requires agents to decide what to choose, but also how much information to sample before committing to a choice. Previously established frameworks for economic choice argue for a deliberative process of evidence accumulation across time. These tacitly acknowledge a role of information sampling, in that decisions are only made once sufficient evidence is acquired, yet few experiments have explicitly placed information sampling under the participant’s control. Here, we use functional MRI to investigate the neural basis of information sampling in economic choice, by allowing participants (n=30, sex not recorded) to actively sample information in a multi-step decision task. We show that medial frontal cortex (MFC) activity is predictive of further information sampling prior to choice. Choice difficulty (inverse value difference, keeping sensory difficulty constant) was also encoded in MFC, but this effect was explained away by the inclusion of information sampling as a co-regressor in the general linear model. A distributed network of regions across prefrontal cortex encoded key features of the sampled information at the time it was presented. We propose that MFC is an important controller of the extent to which information is gathered before committing to an economic choice. This role may explain why MFC activity has been associated with evidence accumulation in previous studies, in which information sampling was an implicit rather than explicit feature of the decision.