Abstract
Decision-making is typically studied as a sequential process from the selection of what to attend (e.g., between possible tasks, stimuli, or stimulus attributes) to which actions to take based on the attended information. However, people often process information across these various levels in parallel. Here we scan participants while they simultaneously weigh how much to attend to two dynamic stimulus attributes and what response to give. Regions of the prefrontal cortex track information about the stimulus attributes in dissociable ways, related to either the predicted reward (ventromedial prefrontal cortex) or the degree to which that attribute is being attended (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dACC). Within the dACC, adjacent regions track correlates of uncertainty at different levels of the decision, regarding what to attend versus how to respond. These findings bridge research on perceptual and value-based decision-making, demonstrating that people dynamically integrate information in parallel across different levels of decision-making.
Highlights
Decision-making is typically studied as a sequential process from the selection of what to attend to which actions to take based on the attended information
Consistent with these findings during the unequal reward epochs, when we performed analogous comparisons of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) sensitivity to the motion and color attributes when the two attributes were rewarded (Epoch 1), we found that the relative sensitivity of dACC to motion versus color predicted the relative sensitivity of choices (b = −0.53, SE = 0.15, t = −3.5, p < 0.002) and Response times (RTs) (b = 0.51, SE = 0.14, t = 3.6, p < 0.002) to those attributes. vmPFC did not exhibit significant associations with either
These findings tentatively suggest that vmPFC signals of attribute evidence scale with the expected reward for that attribute whereas equivalent signals of attribute evidence in dACC scale with the influence that the attribute has on the ultimate decision
Summary
Decision-making is typically studied as a sequential process from the selection of what to attend (e.g., between possible tasks, stimuli, or stimulus attributes) to which actions to take based on the attended information. Within the dACC, adjacent regions track correlates of uncertainty at different levels of the decision, regarding what to attend versus how to respond These findings bridge research on perceptual and value-based decision-making, demonstrating that people dynamically integrate information in parallel across different levels of decision-making. Separate research on valuebased decision-making has examined how individuals select which stimulus dimension(s) to attend in order to maximize their expected rewards[8,9,10,11] It remains unclear how the accumulation of evidence to select high-level goals and/or attentional targets interacts with the simultaneous accumulation of evidence to select responses according to those goals (e.g., based on the perceptual properties of the stimuli). Within dACC, adjacent regions differentiated (in opposite directions) between the coherence of the more rewarding attribute versus the less rewarding attribute, potentially consistent with an account by which these regions track uncertainty at the two levels of the decision, regarding what to attend (rostral dACC) versus how to respond (caudal dACC)
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