Evidence for a Common Representation of Decision Values for Dissimilar Goods in Human Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex

mOFC commonly encodes the DV of multiple classes of goods. A–C, The results from experiment 1 for areas correlating with our goal valuation measure separately for the money, trinket, and food conditions. Columns show areas exhibiting voxel-wise correlations with WTP (color codes depict the statistical thresholds used to display the activation). The peaks of activation are as follows: money condition: [x = −3, y = 42, z = −6], Z = 3.42; trinket condition: [x = 6, y = 39, z = 12], Z = 5.06; snack condition: [x = 3, y = 30, z = 12], Z = 5.00. D, An area of mOFC surviving a conjunction analysis testing for correlations with valuation common to all of the goods in the first experiment (for choices against a fixed monetary bid). The locus of the peak voxel from the conjunction analysis was [x = −3, y = 42, z = −6]; Z = 3.42. The right column shows the average percentage signal change in a 5 mm sphere centered on the peak coordinates from the study by Plassmann et al. (2007), ensuring the independence of this plot from the contrasts used in A–D. The average percentage signal change is shown for the lower ($0–$1) and upper ($3–$4) bounds of WTP. E, Results for the conjunction analysis for the second replication experiment in which choices were made against a fixed snack item. The peak conjunction response in this experiment was [x = −9, y = 39, z = −6]; Z = 3.57. The right column shows the average percentage signal change as a function of WTP, from a 5 mm sphere centered on the peak coordinate derived from experiment 1, ensuring the independence of this plot from the contrasts used to generate the conjunction.