Trends in Cognitive Sciences
ReviewValue, pleasure and choice in the ventral prefrontal cortex
Section snippets
Integrating different approaches to valuation and decision-making
Consider a situation where a choice has to be made between consuming an attractive food and seeking a source of warm, pleasant touch. To decide between these fundamentally different rewards, the brain needs to compute the values and costs associated with two multisensory stimuli, integrate this information with motivational, cognitive and contextual variables and then use these signals as inputs for a stimulus-based choice process. Rapid advances have been made in understanding how these key
Reward and emotion: a Darwinian perspective
The valuation of rewards is a key component process of decision-making. The neurobiological and evolutionary context is as follows [3]. Primary rewards, such as sweet taste and warm touch, are gene-specified (i.e. unlearned) goals for action built into us during evolution by natural selection to direct behavior to stimuli that are important for survival and reproduction. Specification of rewards, the goals for action, by selfish genes is an efficient and adaptive Darwinian way for genes to
From valuation to choice in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex
The operational principles described above enable the OFC and ACC (Tier 2 in Figure 1) to provide value representations that are appropriately scaled to act as inputs into neural systems for economic decision-making, and to promote a progression through the reward space in the environment to find the range of rewards necessary for survival and reproduction [3]. We next consider how neural value representations are transformed into choices in the VMPFC. We describe evidence that choices are made
Phenomenological approaches
By examining computational models of decision-making, we now consider the processes by which the brain may make choices between rewards. One approach, which has been used mainly in the domain of sensory decision-making, can be described as phenomenological, in that a mathematical model is formulated without specifying the underlying neural mechanisms. The main such approach is the accumulator or race model, in which the noisy (variable) incoming evidence is accumulated or integrated until some
Concluding remarks and future priorities
We have linked neurophysiological and neuroimaging to computational approaches to decision-making and have shown that representations of specific rewards on a continuous and similar scale of value in the OFC and ACC (Tier 2) are followed by a noisy attractor-based system for making choices between rewards in VMPFC area 10 (Tier 3). Subjective pleasure is the state associated with the activation of representations in Tier 2, and confidence is an emergent property of the decision-making process
Acknowledgments
Some of the research described in this paper was supported by the Medical Research Council and the Oxford Centre for Computational Neuroscience. F.G. was supported by the Gottlieb-Daimler- and Karl Benz-Foundation, and by the Oxford Centre for Computational Neuroscience.
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