Economic Decisions through Circuit Inhibition

Sebastien Ballesta () and Camillo Padoa-Schioppa
Additional contact information
Sebastien Ballesta: LNCA - Laboratoire de neurosciences cognitives et adaptatives - UNISTRA - Université de Strasbourg - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: Economic choices between goods are thought to rely on the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), but the decision mechanisms remain poorly understood. To shed light on this fundamental issue, we recorded from the OFC of monkeys choosing between two juices offered sequentially. An analysis of firing rates across time windows revealed the presence of different groups of neurons similar to those previously identified under simultaneous offers. This observation suggested that economic decisions in the two modalities are formed in the same neural circuit. We then examined several hypotheses on the decision mechanisms. OFC neurons encoded good identities and values in a juice-based representation (labeled lines). Contrary to previous assessments, our data argued against the idea that decisions rely on mutual inhibition at the level of offer values. In fact, we showed that previous arguments for mutual inhibition were confounded by differences in value ranges. Instead, decisions seemed to involve mechanisms of circuit inhibition, whereby each offer value indirectly inhibited neurons encoding the opposite choice outcome. Our results reconcile a variety of previous findings and provide a general account for the neuronal underpinnings of economic choices.

Date: 2019-11-18
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Current Biology, 2019, 29 (22), ⟨10.1016/j.cub.2019.09.027⟩

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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:hal:journl:hal-04607659

DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.09.027

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().