Flexible combination of reward information across primates

Shiva Farashahi, Christopher H. Donahue, Benjamin Y. Hayden, Daeyeol Lee and Alireza Soltani ()
Additional contact information
Shiva Farashahi: Dartmouth College
Christopher H. Donahue: The Gladstone Institutes
Benjamin Y. Hayden: University of Minnesota
Daeyeol Lee: Yale School of Medicine
Alireza Soltani: Dartmouth College

Nature Human Behaviour, 2019, vol. 3, issue 11, 1215-1224

Abstract: Abstract A fundamental but rarely contested assumption in economics and neuroeconomics is that decision-makers compute subjective values of risky options by multiplying functions of reward probability and magnitude. By contrast, an additive strategy for valuation allows flexible combination of reward information required in uncertain or changing environments. We hypothesized that the level of uncertainty in the reward environment should determine the strategy used for valuation and choice. To test this hypothesis, we examined choice between risky options in humans and rhesus macaques across three tasks with different levels of uncertainty. We found that whereas humans and monkeys adopted a multiplicative strategy under risk when probabilities are known, both species spontaneously adopted an additive strategy under uncertainty when probabilities must be learned. Additionally, the level of volatility influenced relative weighting of certain and uncertain reward information, and this was reflected in the encoding of reward magnitude by neurons in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0714-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nathum:v:3:y:2019:i:11:d:10.1038_s41562-019-0714-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/nathumbehav/

DOI: 10.1038/s41562-019-0714-3

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Human Behaviour is currently edited by Stavroula Kousta

More articles in Nature Human Behaviour from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().