Cortical Brain Activity Reflecting Attentional Biasing Toward Reward Predicting Cues Covaries with Economic Decision Making Performance.
Adaptive choice behavior depends critically on identifying and learning from outcome predicting cues. We hypothesized that attention may be preferentially directed toward certain outcome predicting cues. We studied this possibility by analyzing event related potential (ERP) responses in humans during a probabilistic decision making task. Participants viewed pairs of outcome predicting visual cues and then chose to wager either a small (i.e. loss minimizing) or large (i.e. gain maximizing) amount of money. The cues were bilaterally presented, which allowed us to extract the relative neural responses to each cue by using a contralateral versus ipsilateral ERP contrast. We found an early lateralized ERP response, whose features matched the attention shift related N2pc component and whose amplitude scaled with the learned reward predicting value of the cues as predicted by an attention for reward model. Consistently, we found a double dissociation involving the N2pc. Across participants, gain maximization positively correlated with the N2pc amplitude to the most reliable gain predicting cue, suggesting an attentional bias toward such cues. Conversely, loss minimization was negatively correlated with the N2pc amplitude to the most reliable loss predicting cue, suggesting an attentional avoidance toward such stimuli. These results indicate that learned stimulus reward associations can influence rapid attention allocation, and that differences in this process are associated with individual differences in economic decision making performance.
Cerebral cortex