The neural and cognitive representation of money in decision-making

我研究的总体目标是理解在决策过程中支持偏见、导致次优选择的心理和神经机制。我在赌博行为的特定背景下研究这个问题。大多数关于人类决策的研究，包括对赌博的研究，都用金钱来代表积极和消极的结果（即赢和输），并激励参与者。然而，从心理学的角度来看，钱是一种不寻常的商品。它没有内在价值；相反，钱的价值是在儿童时期就学会的，基于它可以用来交换理想商品的能力。在非人类物种中没有金钱等价物。此外，消费者心理学的研究表明，与现金相比，我们更愿意以某些形式花钱，比如用信用卡。金钱的这些特性与行为神经科学（例如，非人类物种的决策转化模型的有效性）和公共政策（例如，应否允许赌场顾客用信用卡赌博？）都有关系。这一建议的长期目标是描述金钱在风险决策中的心理作用。

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.