The hippocampus supports deliberation during value based decisions
- Columbia University, United States
- Boston University, United States
Abstract
Choosing between two items involves deliberation and comparison of the features of each item and its value. Such decisions take more time when choosing between options of similar value, possibly because these decisions require more evidence, but the mechanisms involved are not clear. We propose that the hippocampus supports deliberation about value, given its well-known role in prospection and relational cognition. We assessed the role of the hippocampus in deliberation in two experiments. First, using fMRI in healthy participants, we found that BOLD activity in the hippocampus increased as a function of deliberation time. Second, we found that patients with hippocampal damage exhibited more stochastic choices and longer reaction times than controls, possibly due to their failure to construct value based on internal evidence during deliberation. Both sets of results were stronger in value-based decisions compared to perceptual decisions.
Data availability
Behavioral data from this study are available as source data included in this submission. Behavioral analysis code is available as source code included in this submission. Analysis code as well as task code is available at https://github.com/abakkour/MDMRT_scan. Imaging data has been deposited to OpenNeuro and is available to download at https://openneuro.org/datasets/ds002006/versions/1.0.0
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Memory and decision making datasetOpenNeuro, ds002006.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
McKnight Foundation (McKnight Memory and Cognitive Disorders Award)
- Daphna Shohamy
National Science Foundation (NSF grant #1606916)
- Akram Bakkour
National Institutes of Health (NIH grant # R01EY011378)
- Michael N Shadlen
Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI Investigator)
- Michael N Shadlen
U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA Senior Research Career Scientist Award & VA Merit Grant CX001748)
- Mieke Verfaellie
National Eye Institute (NEI grant T32-EY013933)
- Yul HR Kang
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication. The contents of this manuscript do not represent the view of the US Department of Veterans Affairs or the US Government.
Ethics
Human subjects: Experimental procedures in Experiment 1 were approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at Columbia University through Columbia IRB Protocol #AAAO5907. All fMRI participants provided signed informed consent before taking part in the study. All patients and age-matched healthy participants in experiment 2 provided informed consent in accordance with the Institutional Review Boards at Boston University and the VA Boston Healthcare System outlined in VABHS IRB #2997.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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The hippocampus supports deliberation during value based decisions
eLife 8:e46080.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.46080
Further reading
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- Neuroscience
When holding visual information temporarily in working memory (WM), the neural representation of the memorandum is distributed across various cortical regions, including visual and frontal cortices. However, the role of stimulus representation in visual and frontal cortices during WM has been controversial. Here, we tested the hypothesis that stimulus representation persists in the frontal cortex to facilitate flexible control demands in WM. During functional MRI, participants flexibly switched between simple WM maintenance of visual stimulus or more complex rule-based categorization of maintained stimulus on a trial-by-trial basis. Our results demonstrated enhanced stimulus representation in the frontal cortex that tracked demands for active WM control and enhanced stimulus representation in the visual cortex that tracked demands for precise WM maintenance. This differential frontal stimulus representation traded off with the newly-generated category representation with varying control demands. Simulation using multi-module recurrent neural networks replicated human neural patterns when stimulus information was preserved for network readout. Altogether, these findings help reconcile the long-standing debate in WM research, and provide empirical and computational evidence that flexible stimulus representation in the frontal cortex during WM serves as a potential neural coding scheme to accommodate the ever-changing environment.
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- Neuroscience
When navigating environments with changing rules, human brain circuits flexibly adapt how and where we retain information to help us achieve our immediate goals.
