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The Journal of Neuroscience, July 29, 2009, 29(30):9575-9581; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1126-09.2009

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Encoding of Marginal Utility across Time in the Human Brain

Alex Pine,^1,2 Ben Seymour,^1,3 Jonathan P. Roiser,⁴ Peter Bossaerts,^5,6 Karl J. Friston,¹ H. Valerie Curran,² and Raymond J. Dolan¹

¹Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, London WC1N 3BG, United Kingdom, ²Clinical Psychopharmacology Unit, Sub-Department of Clinical Health Psychology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, United Kingdom, ³Economic and Social Research Council Centre for Economic Learning and Social Evolution, University College London, London WC1H 0AN, United Kingdom, ⁴Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London WC1N 3AR, United Kingdom, ⁵Laboratory for Decision Making under Uncertainty, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland, and ⁶Computational and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125

Correspondence should be addressed to Alex Pine, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK. Email: a.pine{at}ucl.ac.uk

Marginal utility theory prescribes the relationship between the objective property of the magnitude of rewards and their subjective value. Despite its pervasive influence, however, there is remarkably little direct empirical evidence for such a theory of value, let alone of its neurobiological basis. We show that human preferences in an intertemporal choice task are best described by a model that integrates marginally diminishing utility with temporal discounting. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we show that activity in the dorsal striatum encodes both the marginal utility of rewards, over and above that which can be described by their magnitude alone, and the discounting associated with increasing time. In addition, our data show that dorsal striatum may be involved in integrating subjective valuation systems inherent to time and magnitude, thereby providing an overall metric of value used to guide choice behavior. Furthermore, during choice, we show that anterior cingulate activity correlates with the degree of difficulty associated with dissonance between value and time. Our data support an integrative architecture for decision making, revealing the neural representation of distinct subcomponents of value that may contribute to impulsivity and decisiveness.

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Received March 8, 2009; revised May 7, 2009; accepted June 1, 2009.

Correspondence should be addressed to Alex Pine, Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, 12 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG, UK. Email: a.pine{at}ucl.ac.uk

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