Activity in human reward-sensitive brain areas is strongly context dependent
Section snippets
Participants
Fourteen young adults (six women), ranging in age from 22 to 31 years (M = 25.4) participated in the experiment. All participants were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal visual acuity. They were paid €20, plus a feedback-related bonus of €9, as described below. All participants provided written informed consent, and the experiment was approved by the local research ethics panel.
Task
Each trial (see Fig. 1A for an example) started with the presentation of a central fixation point that
Behavior
There are few meaningful behavioral measures in the task, because outcomes were unrelated to the participants' behavior. Since participants had 2.8 s to choose a card, there were very few trials on which no response was recorded (M = 1.0 trials). The choice reaction times for the trials on which a response was recorded were faster for the win condition (M = 884 ms) than for the lose condition [M = 981 ms; F(1,13) = 13.4, P = 0.003].
fMRI
The analysis of the fMRI data consisted of two steps. Previous
Discussion
The results of the present study provide important insights into the way in which information about rewards and penalties is encoded in the brain. Our central finding is that reward-sensitive areas throughout the brain exhibit a high degree of context sensitivity. More specifically, the results suggest that reward processing systems determine whether an outcome is favorable or unfavorable on the basis of the range of possible outcomes encountered in a particular setting—judging the best
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (S.N.). We thank Nisan Mol and Sanne Boesveldt for technical assistance.
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