Value, confidence, deliberation: a functional partition of the medial prefrontal cortex demonstrated across rating and choice tasks

Abstract

Deciding about courses of action involves an estimation of costs and benefits. Decision neuroscience studies have suggested a dissociation between the ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC and dmPFC), which would process reward value and effort cost, respectively. However, several results appeared inconsistent with this general idea of opponent reward and effort systems. These contradictions might reflect the diversity of tasks used to investigate the trade-off between effort cost and reward value. They might also reflect the confusion with a meta-decision process about the amount of deliberation needed to reach a sufficient confidence in the reward/effort estimates. Here, we used fMRI to examine the neural correlates of reward and effort estimates across several preference tasks, from (dis-)likeability ratings to binary decisions involving attribute integration and option comparison. Results confirm the role of the vmPFC as a generic valuation system, across the different tasks (likeability rating or binary decision) and attributes (the activity increasing with reward value and decreasing with effort cost). However, meta-decision variables were represented in more dorsal regions, with confidence in the mPFC and deliberation time in the dmPFC. These findings suggest that assessing commonalities across preference tasks and distinguishing between decision and meta-decision variables might help reaching a unified view of how the brain chooses a course of action.

Orthogonal neural encoding of targets and distractors supports multivariate cognitive control

“…We found that targets had stronger difficulty coding in more caudal voxels ( t (27.9) = 3.74, p = .000840), with a quadratic trend ( t (26.5) = 4.48, p = .000129). In line with previous work on both perceptual and value-based decision-making (Clairis and Pessiglione, 2020; Fleming et al, 2018; Shenhav et al, 2016a, 2016b), we found that signatures of target discrimination difficulty (negative correlation with target coherence) in caudal dACC were paralleled by signals of target discrimination ease (positive correlation with target coherence) within the rostral-most extent of our dACC ROI (Supplementary Figure 2). In contrast to targets, distractors had stronger incongruence coding in more rostral voxel ( t (28.0) = −3.26, p = .00294), without a significant quadratic trend.…”

Does Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage Really Increase Impulsiveness? Delay and Probability Discounting in Patients with Focal Lesions

“…Notably, activity in ventral striatum and vMPFC coded for subjective value in a domain-general manner, suggesting that these regions integrate results from the domainspecific valuation systems into a common neural currency that is involved in value computation across tasks and is utilized across different reward types and stages of decision-making (Rangel & Clithero, 2014;Bartra et al, 2013;Levy & Glimcher, 2012). Furthermore, activity in these regions can be dissociated from activity in other reward valuation regions (including anterior insula, other striatal regions, and dorsomedial PFC) involved in arousal, saliency of reward options, and meta-decision processes (e.g., confidence and deliberation time of choices; see also Clairis & Pessiglione, 2020). Studying individuals with focal lesions to these brain regions provides more definitive evidence regarding the localization of function in decisionmaking mechanisms, particularly with respect to the issue of domain-general versus domain-specific processes.…”

Evidence or Confidence: What is really monitored during a decision?

“…Importantly, this unique confidence system would not need to consider specific knowledge about upstream evidence accumulation processes or downstream decision steps (i.e., the choice declaration or implementation), allowing it to perform its duty irrespective of the current choice context. Previous work has suggested the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as such a confidence-monitoring brain region, as fMRI activation represented confidence scores across a variety of value-based tasks (Clairis & Pessiglione, 2022).…”

“…Importantly, this unique confidence system would not need to consider specific knowledge about upstream evidence accumulation processes or downstream decision steps (i.e., the choice declaration or implementation), allowing it to perform its duty irrespective of the current choice context. Previous work has suggested the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) as such a confidence-monitoring brain region, as fMRI activation represented confidence scores across a variety of value-based tasks (Clairis & Pessiglione, 2022). Another study found that response confidence was tracked by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and a prefronto-parietal network, similarly for both memory-based and perceptual decisions (Rouault et al, 2021).…”

“…Under the cDDM, the cessation of deliberation would be influenced not only by confidence accumulation, but also by the rate at which the response threshold collapses. A separate brain region might thus monitor the investment of cognitive effort, with the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) having been suggested as a potential candidate region (Clairis & Pessiglione, 2022). The interplay between these regions would thus control the dynamics of an effort-confidence tradeoff in deciding when to decide (Lee & Daunizeau, 2021).…”