Abstract
Money, when used as an incentive, activates the same neural circuits as rewards associated with physiological needs. However, unlike physiological rewards, monetary stimuli are cultural artifacts: how are monetary stimuli identified in the first place? How and when does the brain identify a valid coin, i.e. a disc of metal that is, by social agreement, endowed with monetary properties? We took advantage of the changes in the Euro area in 2002 to compare neural responses to valid coins (Euros, Australian Dollars) with neural responses to invalid coins that have lost all monetary properties (French Francs, Finnish Marks). We show in magneto-encephalographic recordings, that the ventral visual pathway automatically distinguishes between valid and invalid coins, within only ∼150 ms. This automatic categorization operates as well on coins subjects were familiar with as on unfamiliar coins. No difference between neural responses to scrambled controls could be detected. These results could suggest the existence of a generic, all-purpose neural representation of money that is independent of experience. This finding is reminiscent of a central assumption in economics, money fungibility, or the fact that a unit of money is substitutable to another. From a neural point of view, our findings may indicate that the ventral visual pathway, a system previously thought to analyze visual features such as shape or color and to be influenced by daily experience, could also able to use conceptual attributes such as monetary validity to categorize familiar as well as unfamiliar visual objects. The symbolic abilities of the posterior fusiform region suggested here could constitute an efficient neural substrate to deal with culturally defined symbols, independently of experience, which probably fostered money's cultural emergence and success.
Highlights
How does the brain react to money? Money is a powerful incentive, that activates the same neural circuits than rewards associated with physiological needs, such as food or sex [1,2,3,4,5], despite the fact that the status of money as a reward is not innate but has been acquired by experience
The socially-defined concept of monetary validity seems to be incorporated at early latencies in visual signals, even when this concept is not relevant for the task at hand
A parsimonious interpretation of these findings is the existence of a neural representation of a generic, use-independent category ‘‘money’’ in the ventral visual pathway, that is automatically activated
Summary
How does the brain react to money? Money is a powerful incentive, that activates the same neural circuits than rewards associated with physiological needs, such as food or sex [1,2,3,4,5], despite the fact that the status of money as a reward is not innate but has been acquired by experience. The basic neural processing step of money recognition has to be performed before any economic behavior can take place. This is analogous to the notion that a prerequisite for social behavior is to be able to distinguish a face from another visual object. The objective here is to understand how and when the brain does assign the label ‘‘money’’ to a visual input Before answering this question, one has to refine money’s definition. The nature of the category ‘‘coin’’ is very different from the nature of categories like birds or faces that are mostly based on visual similarity This leaves the issue of where and when in the brain a coin is recognized as money quite open
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