Temporally organized representations of reward and risk in the human brain

Abstract

AbstractThe value and uncertainty associated with choice alternatives constitute critical features along which decisions are made. While the neural substrates supporting reward and risk processing have been investigated, the temporal organization by which these computations are encoded remains elusive. Here we leverage the high spatiotemporal precision of intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) to uncover how representations of decision-related computations unfold in time. We present evidence of locally distributed representations of reward and risk variables that are temporally organized across multiple regions of interest. Reward outcome representations across wide-spread regions follow a temporally cascading order along the anteroposterior axis of the brain. In contrast, expected value can be decoded from multiple regions at the same time, and error signals in both reward and risk domains reflect a mixture of sequential and parallel encoding. We highlight the role of the anterior insula in generalizing between reward prediction error (RePE) and risk prediction error (RiPE), within which the encoding of RePE in the distributed iEEG signal predicts RiPE. Together our results emphasize the utility of uncovering temporal dynamics in the human brain for understanding how computational processes critical for value-based decisions under uncertainty unfold.