RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Value Signals in the Prefrontal Cortex Predict Individual Preferences across Reward Categories
JF The Journal of Neuroscience
JO J. Neurosci.
FD Society for Neuroscience
SP 7580
OP 7586
DO 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5082-13.2014
VO 34
IS 22
A1 Gross, Jörg
A1 Woelbert, Eva
A1 Zimmermann, Jan
A1 Okamoto-Barth, Sanae
A1 Riedl, Arno
A1 Goebel, Rainer
YR 2014
UL http://www.jneurosci.org/content/34/22/7580.abstract
AB Humans can choose between fundamentally different options, such as watching a movie or going out for dinner. According to the utility concept, put forward by utilitarian philosophers and widely used in economics, this may be accomplished by mapping the value of different options onto a common scale, independent of specific option characteristics (Fehr and Rangel, 2011; Levy and Glimcher, 2012). If this is the case, value-related activity patterns in the brain should allow predictions of individual preferences across fundamentally different reward categories. We analyze fMRI data of the prefrontal cortex while subjects imagine the pleasure they would derive from items belonging to two distinct reward categories: engaging activities (like going out for drinks, daydreaming, or doing sports) and snack foods. Support vector machines trained on brain patterns related to one category reliably predict individual preferences of the other category and vice versa. Further, we predict preferences across participants. These findings demonstrate that prefrontal cortex value signals follow a common scale representation of value that is even comparable across individuals and could, in principle, be used to predict choice.