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  • Review Article
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Choosing the greater of two goods: neural currencies for valuation and decision making

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 6, pages 363–375 (2005)Cite this article

Key Points

  • This review surveys recent behavioural and electrophysiological studies concerning the neural basis of value-based decisions. Psychophysicists and sensory physiologists traditionally emphasize the effects of sensory stimuli on decision-making, but cognitive psychologists and economists have long known that decision-making is strongly influenced by an organism's prior experience or beliefs concerning the 'value' of alternative choices, often expressed in terms of appetitive or aversive consequences. Although the neural mechanisms that underlie the computation of value are largely unknown, the emerging field of 'neuroeconomics' has taken on the task of elucidating these computations and how they influence choice behaviour.

  • Here we outline a programme of research for the electrophysiological investigation of value-based decision making in awake, behaving monkeys. The key components of this programme are: first, showing that choice behaviour is under the control of value computations emerging from an animal's history of choices and rewards; second, the modelling of behavioural data to gain insight into the decision variables in the brain that might specify these choices; and third, electrophysiological analysis to determine whether and how the hypothesized decision variables are actually encoded within specific neural systems. The heart of the review is a comparison of three recent papers on value-based choice, with specific attention to the key components outlined above. Through a careful consideration of this series of new studies, we aim to elucidate principles that will guide the investigation of value-based choice in the future.

  • From a broader point of view, the new effort to understand value-based choice offers hope for a substantive synthesis of two areas of systems neuroscience that have traditionally existed in separate spheres — the study of cognition and the study of reward and motivation. These subjects are intrinsically linked: cognitive behaviour is typically fuelled by motivation and reward; reward and motivation in turn serve cognitive and behavioural ends. The study of value-based choice provides an ideal platform for analysing the interaction of a quintessentially cognitive behaviour — decision-making — and a quintessentially motivational drive — reward harvesting. The studies reviewed in this paper make a promising start on this ambitious agenda.

Abstract

To make adaptive decisions, animals must evaluate the costs and benefits of available options. The nascent field of neuroeconomics has set itself the ambitious goal of understanding the brain mechanisms that are responsible for these evaluative processes. A series of recent neurophysiological studies in monkeys has begun to address this challenge using novel methods to manipulate and measure an animal's internal valuation of competing alternatives. By emphasizing the behavioural mechanisms and neural signals that mediate decision making under conditions of uncertainty, these studies might lay the foundation for an emerging neurobiology of choice behaviour.

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Figure 1: Visual and oculomotor systems of the primate brain.
Figure 2: Conceptual frameworks for decision making.
Figure 3: Decision-making tasks.
Figure 4: Payoff matrices for competitive games.
Figure 5: Demonstrating behavioural control.
Figure 6: A local model of matching behaviour.
Figure 7: Influence of global and local values on monkey choices and lateral intraparietal area activity.

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Acknowledgements

We thank several colleagues who provided critical comments and suggestions during the preparation of this review: S. Baccus, C. Fiorillo, B. Linkenhoker, J. Reppas, A. Rorie and M. Shadlen. We also thank R. Gallistel of Rutgers University who taught us a great deal about matching behaviour and helped us design the oculomotor matching task used in our own studies. L.P.S. was supported by a Stanford Graduate Fellowship and by the Medical Scientist Training Program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. G.S.C. was also supported by a Stanford Graduate Fellowship and is currently supported by a National Research Service Award predoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health. W.T.N. is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is also support by the National Eye Institute.

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  1. Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, 94305, California, USA

    Leo P. Sugrue, Greg S. Corrado & William T. Newsome

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Sugrue, L., Corrado, G. & Newsome, W. Choosing the greater of two goods: neural currencies for valuation and decision making. Nat Rev Neurosci 6, 363–375 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1666

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