Separate Valuation Subsystems for Delay and Effort Decision Costs

By Charlotte Prévost, Mathias Pessiglione, Elise Météreau, M. Cléry-Melin, Jean-Claude Dreher. Journal of Neuroscience, 2010

473 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Decision making consists of choosing among available options on the basis of a valuation of their potential costs and benefits. Most theoretical models of decision making in behavioral economics, psychology, and computer science propose that the desirability of outcomes expected from alternative options can be quantified by utility functions. These utility functions allow a decision maker to assign subjective values to each option under consideration by weighting the likely benefits and costs resulting from an action and to select the one with the highest subjective value. Here, we used model-based neuroimaging to test whether the human brain uses separate valuation systems for rewards (erotic stimuli) associated with different types of costs, namely, delay and effort. We show that humans devalue rewards associated with physical effort in a strikingly similar fashion to those they devalue that are associated with delays, and that a single computational model derived from economics theory can account for the behavior observed in both delay discounting and effort discounting. However, our neuroimaging data reveal that the human brain uses distinct valuation subsystems for different types of costs, reflecting in opposite fashion delayed reward and future energetic expenses. The ventral striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex represent the increasing subjective value of delayed rewards, whereas a distinct network, composed of the anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula, represent the decreasing value of the effortful option, coding the expected expense of energy. Together, these data demonstrate that the valuation processes underlying different types of costs can be fractionated at the cerebral level.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20535617d88aed2e88aa423f0d9fea43da70878a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In General Decision Sciences

Citations in the corpus

An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance (2013, unknown): “…the anterior cingulate also shift animals’ preferences away from high effort–high reward options (Rudebeck et al. 2006; Walton et al. 2003), and the costs of physical effort are robustly encoded in this region (Croxson et al. 2009; Kennerley et al. 2009; Kurniawan et al. 2010; Prevost et al. 2010).”
The expected value of control: An integrative theory of anterior cingulate cortex function (2013, unknown): “…the options in contention that is represented in other structures, such as ventral regions of mPFC (Floresco et al., 2008; Haber and Knutson, 2010; Prévost et al., 2010; Rangel and Hare, 2010; Rushworth et al., 2011). dACC and the Cost of Cognitive Control The expected value of a…”
Neuronal Reward and Decision Signals: From Theories to Data. (2015, methodology): “In analogy to temporal discounting (see Equations 17 and 18 below), alternative effort models used in some neurobiological studies (419, 439) incorporate effort cost into net benefit by exponential discounting”
The Computation of Stimulus Values in Simple Choice (2014, result): “Similar results have been found in dozens of follow-up studies (Hare et al., 2010; Knutson et al., 2007; Peters and Buchel, 2009; Prevost et al., 2010; Wu et al., 2011).”