Value, Confidence, Deliberation: A Functional Partition of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex Demonstrated across Rating and Choice Tasks

Abstract

Deciding about courses of action involves minimizing costs and maximizing benefits. Decision neuroscience studies have implicated both the ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC and dmPFC) in signaling goal value and action cost, but the precise functional role of these regions is still a matter of debate. Here, we suggest a more general functional partition that applies not only to decisions but also to judgments about goal value (expected reward) and action cost (expected effort). In this conceptual framework, cognitive representations related to options (reward value and effort cost) are dissociated from metacognitive representations (confidence and deliberation) related to solving the task (providing a judgment or making a choice). We used an original approach aiming at identifying consistencies across several preference tasks, from likeability ratings to binary decisions involving both attribute integration and option comparison. fMRI results in human male and female participants confirmed the vmPFC as a generic valuation system, its activity increasing with reward value and decreasing with effort cost. In contrast, more dorsal regions were not concerned with the valuation of options but with metacognitive variables, confidence being reflected in mPFC activity and deliberation time in dmPFC activity. Thus, there was a dissociation between the effort attached to choice options (represented in the vmPFC) and the effort invested in deliberation (represented in the dmPFC), the latter being expressed in pupil dilation. More generally, assessing commonalities across preference tasks might help reaching a unified view of the neural mechanisms underlying the cost/benefit tradeoffs that drive human behavior. Significance statementDecision neuroscience studies have implicated the medial prefrontal cortex in forming the cognitive representations that drive human choice behavior. However, different studies using different tasks have suggested somewhat inconsistent links between precise computational variables and specific brain regions. Here, we use fMRI to demonstrate a robust functional partition of the medial PFC that generalizes across tasks involving an estimation of goal value and/or action cost to provide a judgement or make a choice. This general functional partition makes a critical dissociation between neural representations of decisional factors (the expected costs and benefits attached to a given option) and metacognitive estimates (confidence in the judgment or choice, and effort invested in the deliberation process).

A neurometabolic mechanism involving dmPFC/dACC lactate in physical effort-based decision-making

“…Therefore, we validated the robustness of our tasks not only for assessing effort-based decision-making across physical and mental domains as shown above ( Results: Behavioral Results ), but also by confirming their ability to engage the dmPFC/dACC and aIns during such processes. This supports the documented contributions of these regions to effort valuation and decision-making 10,11,61,67–71 , with our analysis distinguishing this activation from factors like subjective value perception 60,62,63 or reaction times 64–66 .…”

The human reward system encodes the subjective value of ideas during creative thinking

“…In parallel, the role of the BVS - and, in particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) - has been challenged by recent studies. They argue that rather than representing one’s subjective value for the object they are processing (33,34,36), the BVS could be representing slightly different variables, such as one’s goal value (53–56) or one’s confidence in the rating (57,58). In the current study, control analyses found no significant evidence indicating a confound with confidence.…”

Editorial: Credition—An interdisciplinary approach to the nature of beliefs and believing

“…Findings from functional neuroimaging studies support the view that the orbitofrontal cortex contributes to expectation-guided decision-making by enabling us to simulate the consequences of our choices ( Kahnt ). Moreover, it was found in choice tasks that value of the items and confidence in the decision involve large parts of the medial prefrontal cortex with a specific activation for value in the ventral portion and for confidence more dorsally in the anterior portion (Claris and Pessiglione, 2022 ).…”