Neural Mechanisms of Cost and Benefit Integration During Decision-Making

描述(申请人提供)：有效地做出决定是权衡成本和收益的过程。尽管在过去20年里，在理解人类和猴子衡量利益的神经机制方面取得了巨大进展，但人们对这些物种的大脑如何衡量成本的了解要少得多。然而，来自人类和猴子的越来越多的证据表明，成本和收益可能由不同的神经系统编码，并在很晚的时候整合到决策级联中。在这里，我们提出了一组简单的实验，旨在正交化人类和猴子决策过程中的成本和收益，同时我们测量-并操纵-在一系列决策相关领域的神经活动。我们的目标是检验这样一个假设，即独立的前部区域(主要在额叶皮质)维持着单独的成本和收益表征，这些表征随后被整合在一起(在眼球运动任务中)用于选择，这通常被称为额顶叶选择回路。为了验证这一假设，我们提出了一套互补的人体功能磁共振成像(FMRI)实验，以及猴子的单单位记录和蝇油灭活实验。功能磁共振成像实验允许对我们的假设进行大规模的全脑测试。单一单位研究允许对每个领域的成本和效益代表性程度进行严格的量化衡量，并有能力在成本效益综合中确定部分或全部这些领域的因果关系。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Making decisions efficiently is the process of weighing costs and benefits. And while enormous progress has been made in the last two decades towards understanding the neural mechanisms by which humans and monkeys weigh benefits, much less is known about how the brains of these species weigh costs. There is, however, growing evidence from both humans and monkeys indicating that costs and benefits may be encoded by distinct neural systems and integrated quite late in the decision cascade. Here we propose a set of simple experiments designed to orthogonalize costs and benefits during human and monkey decision-making while we measure - and manipulate - neural activity in a suite of decision-related areas. Our goal is to test the hypothesis that separate anterior areas (mostly in the frontal cortex) maintain separate representations of costs and benefits, representations that are subsequently integrated for choice (in oculomotor tasks) in what are often called the fronto-parietal choice circuits. To test this hypothesis we propose a complementary set of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) experiments in humans and single unit recording and muscimol inactivation experiments in monkeys. The fMRI experiments allow for a large-scale whole-brain test of our hypothesis. The single unit studies allow a rigorous quantitative measurement of the degree of cost and benefit representation in each area and the ability to establish a causal for some or all of these areas in cost benefit integration.