Abstract
AbstractFrontal and parietal cortex are implicated in economic decision-making, but their causal roles are untested. Here we silenced the frontal orienting field (FOF) and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) while rats chose between a cued lottery and a small stable surebet. PPC inactivations produced minimal short-lived effects. FOF inactivations reliably reduced lottery choices. A mixed-agent model of choice indicated that silencing the FOF caused a change in the curvature of the rats’ utility function (U = Vρ). Consistent with this finding, single-neuron and population analyses of neural activity confirmed that the FOF encodes the lottery value on each trial. A dynamical model, which accounts for electrophysiological and silencing results, suggests that the FOF represents the current lottery value to compare against the remembered surebet value. These results demonstrate that the FOF is a critical node in the neural circuit for the dynamic representation of action values for choice under risk.
Funder
National Science Foundation of China | Major Research Plan
Wellcome Trust
Gatsby Charitable Foundation
111 project
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference67 articles.
1. Linner, R. K. et al. Genome-wide association analyses of risk tolerance and risky behaviors in over 1 million individuals identify hundreds of loci and shared genetic influences. Nat. Genet. 51, 245–257 (2019).
2. Yates, J. F. (ed). Risk-Taking Behavior (Wiley, 1992).
3. Von Neumann, J. & Morgenstern, O. Theory of Games and Economic Behavior 3rd edn (Princeton Univ. Press, 1953).
4. Jensen, J. L. W. V. Sur les fonctions convexes et les inégalités entre les valeurs moyennes. Acta Mathematica 30, 175–193 (1906).
5. Garcia, B., Cerrotti, F. & Palminteri, S. The description-experience gap: a challenge for the neuroeconomics of decision-making under uncertainty. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 376, 20190665 (2021).