Work

Information utility in the human brain

Year: 2018

Type: article

Abstract: A funding agency just made a decision about your grant application. The official letter should arrive tomorrow, announcing the outcome, but you can log in to the agency’s website and find out today. Would you? Humans and other animals are intrinsically motivated to acquire information, even when this information is of no instrumental value. This makes sense—after all, “knowledge is power” and, outside of the laboratory, information can guide action, to maximize gains and avoid harm. However, in some cases, people prefer to avoid information (1), particularly when this information is likely to validate a negative prediction. Recent theories propose that information carries its own utility—positive utility if the knowledge is likely to confirm a desirable belief (e.g., that your grant will be funded) and negative utility if it is more likely to support an undesirable belief (that your grant will not be funded). In PNAS, Charpentier et al. (2) use a novel experimental paradigm to provide behavioral support for these theories as well as evidence for neural encoding of the utility of information which is consistent with the theories. In an fMRI experiment (Fig. 1), participants were presented with monetary lotteries. On some trials, the lottery offered a chance for winning $1 (or winning nothing); on other trials, the lottery presented a chance for losing $1 (or losing nothing). The probability for winning or losing (between 0.1 and 0.9) was conveyed in the form of a pie chart. Participants could not affect the outcome in any way, and this was made clear to them. They could, however, express their preference for finding out the outcome on each trial. Participants did this by choosing one of two options, offering different probabilities for revealing the outcome. After making the choice, participants were notified whether they would receive the information (knowledge cue) … [↵][1]1Email: ifat.levy{at}yale.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1809865115

Author: Ifat Levy

Institution: Yale University

Language: English

Topic: Neural dynamics and brain function

Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience

Field: Neuroscience

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Institute on Aging

Award: Medical decision-making under uncertainty in older adults - behavior and fMRI