Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: Many decisions rely on how we evaluate potential outcomes and estimate their corresponding probabilities of occurrence. Outcome evaluation is subjective because it requires consulting internal preferences and is sensitive to context. In contrast, probability estimation requires extracting statistics from the environment and therefore imposes unique challenges to the decision maker. Here, we show that probability estimation, like outcome evaluation, is subject to context effects that bias probability estimates away from other events present in the same context. However, unlike valuation, these context effects appeared to be scaled by estimated uncertainty, which is largest at intermediate probabilities. Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) imaging showed that patterns of multivoxel activity in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) predicted individual differences in context effects on probability estimates. These results establish VMPFC as the neurocomputational substrate shared between valuation and probability estimation and highlight the additional involvement of dACC and IPS that can be uniquely attributed to probability estimation. Because probability estimation is a required component of computational accounts from sensory inference to higher cognition, the context effects found here may affect a wide array of cognitive computations.
Source: PLoS Biology
Authors: Wei-Hsiang Lin, Justin L. Gardner, Shih-Wei Wu
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,000
Awards: The Neurobiology of Decision-Making: How Prior Experience, Environmental Uncertainty, and Rewards Affect How the Brain Makes Decisions, Value and Probability Coding in the Brain: Combining Fmri with Intracranial Electrophysiology to Understand Their Neural Coding Properties, The Influence of Variability in Prior Information on Information Integration: an Investigation on the Psychological and Neural Mechanisms, Neural Mechanisms for Reference-Dependent Value Computations
OpenAlex ID: W3010427622