Abstract
The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is commonly associated with cognitive control and decision making, but its specific function is highly debated. To explore a recent theory that the ACC learns the reward values of task contexts (Holroyd & McClure in Psychological Review, 122, 54-83, 2015; Holroyd & Yeung in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 122-128, 2012), we recorded the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) from participants as they played a novel gambling task. The participants were first required to select from among three games in one "virtual casino," and subsequently they were required to select from among three different games in a different virtual casino; unbeknownst to them, the payoffs for the games were higher in one casino than in the other. Analysis of the reward positivity, an ERP component believed to reflect reward-related signals carried to the ACC by the midbrain dopamine system, revealed that the ACC is sensitive to differences in the reward values associated with both the casinos and the games inside the casinos, indicating that participants learned the values of the contexts in which rewards were delivered. These results highlight the importance of the ACC in learning the reward values of task contexts in order to guide action selection.
Highlights
Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is involved in decision making and cognitive control, but its exact role in this domain is debated
We have previously proposed that ACC utilizes reward prediction error signals (RPEs) carried by the midbrain dopamine system for the purpose of reinforcing adaptive behaviors, and that this process is revealed by a component of the event-related brain potential (ERP) called the reward positivity (Holroyd & Coles, 2002)
An influential theory holds that the reward positivity is produced by the modulatory influence of midbrain dopamine RPE signals on ACC activity (Holroyd & Coles, 2002)
Summary
Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is involved in decision making and cognitive control, but its exact role in this domain is debated. The model proposes that ACC learns the value of entire task policies and selects the policies on the basis of those learned values (Holroyd & Coles, 2002; cf Daw, Niv, & Dayan, 2005) Recent developments of this idea have suggested that ACC encodes the value of the task context itself, rather than the value of the individual actions carried out within the task (Holroyd & McClure, 2015; Holroyd & Yeung, 2011, 2012). These contextual values are utilized by ACC to motivate task performance (Umemoto & Holroyd, 2016) To investigate this issue, we recorded the reward positivity from participants engaged in a novel casino-gambling task that allowed for learning the reward value of the task context (cf Diuk, Tsai, Wallis, Botvinick, & Niv, 2013). The task encouraged participants to learn values for internal representations of the two casino contexts (Holroyd & McClure, 2015)
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