| Popis: |
Decisions that require taking prospective effort costs into account are ubiquitous in real life. The common currency theory hypothesizes that a neural network integrates different costs and rewards into a common scale to facilitate value comparison. Although there has been a surge of interest in the computational and neural basis of effort-reward integration, it is still under debate if the common currency theory could be applied to value integration in this context. Here, we comprehensively compared effort-based and risky decision-making using computational modeling, univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses, and data from two independent studies. We found that prospective outcomes were distinctively discounted by effort and risk. Moreover, although univariate fMRI analyses showed diverse results between tasks, multivariate decoding analyses indicated that the neural patterns of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) represented subjective value information across effort-based and risky decision-making. These findings suggest that the dmPFC plays a critical role in computing subjective value in a task-independent manner and thus extend the scope of the common currency theory. |
