The dorsomedial prefrontal cortex represents subjective value across effort-based and risky decision-making
Yuan-Wei Yao,
Kun-Ru Song,
Nicolas W. Schuck,
Xin Li,
Xiao-Yi Fang,
Jin-Tao Zhang,
Hauke R. Heekeren,
Rasmus Bruckner
Affiliations
Yuan-Wei Yao
Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Einstein Center for Neurosciences Berlin, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany; Department of Systems Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany; Max Planck Research Group NeuroCode, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany; Corresponding authors.
Kun-Ru Song
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Nicolas W. Schuck
Max Planck Research Group NeuroCode, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany; Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, Berlin, Germany; Institute of Psychology, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Xin Li
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Xiao-Yi Fang
Institute of Developmental Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
Jin-Tao Zhang
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China; Corresponding authors.
Hauke R. Heekeren
Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Executive University Board, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Rasmus Bruckner
Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany; Max Planck Research Group NeuroCode, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany
Decisions that require taking effort costs into account are ubiquitous in real life. The neural common currency theory hypothesizes that a particular neural network integrates different costs (e.g., risk) and rewards into a common scale to facilitate value comparison. Although there has been a surge of interest in the computational and neural basis of effort-related value integration, it is still under debate if effort-based decision-making relies on a domain-general valuation network as implicated in the neural common currency theory. Therefore, we comprehensively compared effort-based and risky decision-making using a combination of computational modeling, univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses, and data from two independent studies. We found that effort-based decision-making can be best described by a power discounting model that accounts for both the discounting rate and effort sensitivity. At the neural level, multivariate decoding analyses indicated that the neural patterns of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) represented subjective value across different decision-making tasks including either effort or risk costs, although univariate signals were more diverse. These findings suggest that multivariate dmPFC patterns play a critical role in computing subjective value in a task-independent manner and thus extend the scope of the neural common currency theory.
