The neural and cognitive representation of money in decision-making

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The overall goal of my research is to understand the psychological and neural mechanisms that underpin biases in decision-making, giving rise to suboptimal choices. I study this in the specific context of gambling behavior. Most research on human decision-making, including research on gambling, uses money to represent positive and negative outcomes (i.e. wins and losses) and incentivize participants. Yet from a psychological perspective, money is an unusual commodity. It has no inherent value; rather, the value of money is learned in childhood, based upon its capacity to be exchanged for desirable goods. There is no equivalent of money in non-human species. Moreover, research from consumer psychology indicates that we are more willing to spend money in certain forms, for example on a credit card compared to physical cash. These peculiarities of money are relevant to both behavioural neuroscience (e.g. validity of translational models of decision-making in non-human species) and public policy (e.g. should casino patrons be allowed to gamble using a credit card?). The long-term objective of this proposal is to characterize the psychological role of money in risky decision-making. ***We will commence this program with three short-term objectives. First, using behavioural measures, we will examine the relationship between a classical behavioural economic test of loss aversion' (the tendency to over-weight financial losses relative to equivalently-sized gains) and gambling behavior on real slot machines in our Casino Lab'. Second, we will conduct behavioural tests that involve manipulating the psychological perception of money. How do financial decisions vary when playing with cash versus playing on credit, or playing with gifted funds versus funds that have been earned? How do financial decisions vary when profits are presented as a cumulative score, compared to when the gains and losses are paid out (realized') after each decision? Third, we will use functional brain imaging to examine how these factors influence the neural representation of monetary decision-making, focusing on the ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex as brain regions that are critical for processing financial decisions and outcomes. These brain signals can also be distorted relative to the objective value of the outcomes. My lab's approach is unique in studying decision-making during realistic gambling games including modern slot machines, and then employing neuroscience tools to elucidate the brain basis of these behavioural biases. By characterizing these monetary effects, the anticipated results will lay a foundation for behaviourally-informed strategies to optimize financial decision-making, and will specifically guide gambling policy (e.g. credit card or cellphone payment options in casinos) to reduce the harms associated with gambling among Canadians.