Evidence for a Common Representation of Decision Values for Dissimilar Goods in Human Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

By Vikram S. Chib, Antonio Rangel, Shinsuke Shimojo, John P. O'Doherty. Journal of Neuroscience, 2009

604 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To make economic choices between goods, the brain needs to compute representations of their values. A great deal of research has been performed to determine the neural correlates of value representations in the human brain. However, it is still unknown whether there exists a region of the brain that commonly encodes decision values for different types of goods, or if, in contrast, the values of different types of goods are represented in distinct brain regions. We addressed this question by scanning subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they made real purchasing decisions among different categories of goods (food, nonfood consumables, and monetary gambles). We found activity in a key brain region previously implicated in encoding goal-values: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was correlated with the subjects' value for each category of good. Moreover, we found a single area in vmPFC to be correlated with the subjects' valuations for all categories of goods. Our results provide evidence that the brain encodes a “common currency” that allows for a shared valuation for different categories of goods.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3572e8b5d1c576a72f6a4cc45b15ea083259f43b

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Citations in the corpus

The social brain in psychiatric and neurological disorders (2012, positive): “In the case of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, this region has now been identified as necessary for the acquisition and storage of associations between stimuli and their value [54] – especially value related to social emotions [55,56] that motivate and guide complex social behaviors [57].”
Understanding consumers’ intention to use plastic bags: using an extended theory of planned behaviour model (2017, background): “Convenience refers to individual’s perceptions on the manageability and difficulty of taking the specific action (Chib et al. 2009).”
Emotion and the Prefrontal Cortex: An Integrative Review (2017, neutral): “, 2007), pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (area 24/32; Chib et al., 2009; Litt, Plassmann, Shiv, & Rangel, 2011), subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (area 25; FitzGerald, Seymour, & Dolan, 2009), rostromedial PFC (area 10; Hunt et al.”
Social and monetary reward learning engage overlapping neural substrates. (2012, background): “Stimulus value signals have been found in ventral and medial sectors of the prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in several human fMRI (Kable and Glimcher, 2007; Plassmann et al., 2007; Tom et al., 2007; Hare et al., 2008, 2009; Chib et al., 2009; FitzGerald et al., 2009; Litt et al., 2009; Levy et al., 2010; ”
Neural computations associated with goal-directed choice. (2010, background): “[72] investigating decisions using consumer goods, food, and monetary rewards is shown in red.”
Neural computations underlying arbitration between model-based and model-free learning (2013, methodology): “For the areas (posterior putamen and vmPFC) about which we had a strong a priori hypothesis about value signals (Boorman et al., 2009; Chib et al., 2009; Hare et al., 2011; Rushworth et al., 2011; Tricomi et al., 2009; Wunderlich et al., 2012), small volume corrections were performed within a 10-mm ”
The root of all value: a neural common currency for choice (2012, methodology): “Soon afterwards, Chib et al. (2009) [30] made this argument in a more fundamental way when they explored the neural representation of three different reward types using a within-subject design.”