Preference-based decision-making in health and disease, from behavior to circuit to gene

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event Preference-based decision-making in health and disease, from behavior to circuit to gene Hans C. Breiter1* 1 Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, United States A tremendous amount of progress has been made over the past decades at the interface of decision neuroscience and reward neuroscience. Problematically, reward neuroscience has been based on old models of preference-based judgment and decision-making that fundamentally reflect the stimulus-response model of behavioral psychology, and which are inconsistent with agency or self-determination. For models such as prospect theory and the matching law, subjective value is not defined within a person or “agent-centric” framework, whereby all variables are defined within the individual. Rather, subjective value is linked to a framework outside of the individual, consistent with the stimulus-response model. Recent work points to an alternative formulation, in the form of a model of preference-based judgment and decision-making for which all variables are grounded in the individual and do not have external referents, but which still merge critical features from the matching law, alliesthesia, and prospect theory. Referred to as relative preference theory (RPT), this newer framework appears to have biological plausibility in that it can be associated with reward circuitry function and structural measures by MRI, and can be associated with measures of genetic variability using imaging-based intermediate phenotypes. This newer framework also has salient signatures for brain pathology in the form of addiction and other functional brain disorders, and can be integrated with multimodal imaging measures to develop mechanistic hypotheses. A specific example of this will be discussed for addiction, wherein a defining feature of addiction can be quantified with RPT, and connected with decreased thickness of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex; altered cortical topology can in turn be integrated with altered measures of cortico-cortical connectivity by DTI, baseline perfusion by CASL, and other MRI measures to suggest novel approaches to diagnosis and development of therapeutic interventions. It should be noted that RPT was developed through an iterative modeling approach to data, which uses an engineering framework for analysis, with the aim of understanding what patterns in data can be described mathematically, and are recurrent, robust, and potentially scalable (i.e., “law-like”). Scalable principles of behavior may allow us to move beyond statistical association between measures of behavior, brain and gene, to facilitate integration of measures across levels of organization in the CNS. This same perspective guides efforts to uncover what principles underlie the connectivity matrix of the brain, and other measures of its architecture. Ultimately, the goal is to integrate principles underlying behavior with those defining brain structure/function. Such integration will be necessary if we are to ultimately model the differences between health and disease in preference-based decision-making. Keywords: decision neuroscience, Reward neuroscience Conference: Decision Neuroscience From Neurons to Societies, Berlin, Germany, 23 Sep - 25 Sep, 2010. Presentation Type: Speaker Topic: Abstracts Citation: Breiter HC (2010). Preference-based decision-making in health and disease, from behavior to circuit to gene. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: Decision Neuroscience From Neurons to Societies. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2010.82.00004 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 13 Aug 2010; Published Online: 07 Sep 2010. * Correspondence: Dr. Hans C Breiter, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, Boston, United States, hansbreiter@comcast.net Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. 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