Elsevier

NeuroImage

Volume 25, Issue 4, 1 May 2005, Pages 1302-1309
NeuroImage

Activity in human reward-sensitive brain areas is strongly context dependent

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.12.043Get rights and content

Abstract

Functional neuroimaging research in humans has identified a number of brain areas that are activated by the delivery of primary and secondary reinforcers. The present study investigated how activity in these reward-sensitive regions is modulated by the context in which rewards and punishments are experienced. Fourteen healthy volunteers were scanned during the performance of a simple monetary gambling task that involved a “win” condition (in which the possible outcomes were a large monetary gain, a small gain, or no gain of money) and a “lose” condition (in which the possible outcomes were a large monetary loss, a small loss, or no loss of money). We observed reward-sensitive activity in a number of brain areas previously implicated in reward processing, including the striatum, prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, and inferior parietal lobule. Critically, activity in these reward-sensitive areas was highly sensitive to the range of possible outcomes from which an outcome was selected. In particular, these regions were activated to a comparable degree by the best outcomes in each condition–a large gain in the win condition and no loss of money in the lose condition–despite the large difference in the objective value of these outcomes. In addition, some reward-sensitive brain areas showed a binary instead of graded sensitivity to the magnitude of the outcomes from each distribution. These results provide important evidence regarding the way in which the brain scales the motivational value of events by the context in which these events occur.

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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