Abstract
Activity in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been linked both to commitment to a course of action, even when it is associated with costs, and to exploring or searching for alternative courses of action. Here we review evidence that this is due to the presence of multiple signals in ACC reflecting the updating of beliefs and internal models of the environment and encoding aspects of choice value, including the average value of choices afforded by the environment ('search value'). We contrast this evidence with the influential view that ACC activity is better described as reflecting task difficulty. A consideration of cortical neural network properties explains why ACC may carry such signals and also exhibit sensitivity to task difficulty.
Highlights
Activity in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been linked both to commitment to a course of action, even when it is associated with costs, and to exploring or searching for alternative courses of action
We review evidence that this is due to the presence of multiple signals in ACC reflecting the updating of beliefs and internal models of the environment and encoding aspects of choice value, including the average value of choices afforded by the environment (‘search value’)
A series of recent studies have demonstrated the presence of activity changes in ACC that correspond to the types of signals that would be needed to guide such behaviour; these signals encode the values of actions [7,12,13,14,15,16,17,18], the average value of alternative courses of action in the environment (‘search value’) as opposed to the current or default course of action [19,20,21], exploration and evaluation of hypotheses about the best course of action to take [22,23,24], and reflect updating of decisionmakers’ beliefs and internal models of their environments [25,26]
Summary
A series of recent studies have demonstrated the presence of activity changes in ACC that correspond to the types of signals that would be needed to guide such behaviour; these signals encode the values of actions [7,12,13,14,15,16,17,18], the average value of alternative courses of action in the environment (‘search value’) as opposed to the current or default course of action [19,20,21], exploration and evaluation of hypotheses about the best course of action to take [22,23,24], and reflect updating of decisionmakers’ beliefs and internal models of their environments [25,26] Are such signals found in ACC but they are weak or absent in regions such as orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex that carry other value signals [12,19,20,22]. Even if the experiment examines decisions on either side of the objective indifference point — the point at which searching and engaging objectively have the same value — it is still possible that the sampling is unequal with
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