The Scylla and Charybdis of Neuroeconomic Approaches to Psychopathology

Abstract

As neuroeconomics enters its second decade, it is fair to ask whether it represents a useful confluence of two disciplines or simply a compound word with aspirations to be much more. Neuroeconomics rests upon two important assumptions, the first is the ideal rational agent model, which guides the definition of optimal decision-making and the valuations that should underlie it. The second is that neuroimaging is capable of providing insights into the neurobiology of the decision-making process. This special issue attempts to stretch the methods and metaphors of neuroeconomics toward the characterization and understanding of psychiatric disorders. Neuroeconomics gains extra strength from three features that may help it reach beyond it beginnings – (1) its capacity to connect decision-making variables to details of neural circuits including details extracted from model animal systems, (2) its natural connection to computational theory with the best example being reinforcement learning (1,2), and (3) its connection to game theory (3). All three areas provide support for the current effort to use neuroeconomics to forge a new understanding of certain psychopathologies (e.g. 4). One hope is that computational modeling and game theoretic structuring of behavioral probes will help leverage this effort. To be successful, these early efforts must meet at least five important criteria. Does the approach produce pointers to consistent neural circuits underlying functions perturbed by mental disease? Do ideas about mental disease gain extra richness from mappings on to computational models, neural structures, or functional activations in brain imaging experiments? Will useful and new endophenotypes emerge from this work? Is the metaphor of the rational agent helpful or limiting? Is the neural data in humans still to crude to reach up to disease or down to basic neurobiological mechanisms? The contributions to this special issue touch on all these issues, but these are still early days and the jury is out. However, some of the most fruitful first steps appear to be in the area of neural circuits and their connection to clearly identified derangements in mental function.