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About the Authors:
Habiba Azab
Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
* E-mail: [email protected]
Affiliation: Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America
ORCID http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6352-9038
Benjamin Y. Hayden
Roles Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Visualization, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing
Affiliation: Department of Neuroscience and Center for Magnetic Resonance Research, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States of AmericaAbstract
We hypothesized that during binary economic choice, decision makers use the first option they attend as a default to which they compare the second. To test this idea, we recorded activity of neurons in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) of macaques choosing between gambles presented asynchronously. We find that ensemble encoding of the value of the first offer includes both choice-dependent and choice-independent aspects, as if reflecting a partial decision. That is, its responses are neither entirely pre- nor post-decisional. In contrast, coding of the value of the second offer is entirely decision dependent (i.e., post-decisional). This result holds even when offer-value encodings are compared within the same time period. Additionally, we see no evidence for 2 pools of neurons linked to the 2 offers; instead, all comparison appears to occur within a single functionally homogenous pool of task-selective neurons. These observations suggest that economic choices reflect a context-dependent evaluation of attended options. Moreover, they raise the possibility that value representations reflect, to some extent, a tentative commitment to a choice.
Author summary
How we make decisions based on value and how these computations are implemented in neuronal circuits remain topics of active debate. It also remains unclear how attention shapes how we perceive and process value. The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex has been implicated in both value-based decision-making and attention, although its role in these processes remains controversial. We investigated the neuronal mechanisms underlying value-based choice in the macaque dorsal anterior cingulate cortex using a task in which subjects chose between 2 sequential options. We find that value encoding in this region reflects partial commitment to a decision, suggesting this region is actively involved in the decision-making process. We also see...