Back

A neuronal prospect theory model in the brain reward circuitry

Imaizumi, Y.; Tymula, A.; Tsubo, Y.; Matsumoto, M.; Yamada, H.

2021-12-20 neuroscience
10.1101/2021.12.18.473272 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Prospect theory, arguably the most prominent theory of choice, is an obvious candidate for neural valuation models. How the activity of individual neurons, a possible computational unit, reflects prospect theory remains unknown. Here, we show with theoretical accuracy equivalent to that of human neuroimaging studies that single-neuron activity in four core reward-related cortical and subcortical regions represents the subjective valuation of risky gambles in monkeys. The activity of individual neurons in monkeys passively viewing a lottery reflects the desirability of probabilistic rewards, parameterized as a multiplicative combination of a utility and probability weighting functions in the prospect theory framework. The diverse patterns of valuation signals were not localized but distributed throughout most parts of the reward circuitry. A network model aggregating these signals reliably reconstructed risk preferences and subjective probability perceptions revealed by the animals choices. Thus, distributed neural coding explains the computation of subjective valuations under risk.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.