Neuronal origins of reduced accuracy and biases in economic choices under sequential offers
Abstract
Economic choices are characterized by a variety of biases. Understanding their origins is a long-term goal for neuroeconomics, but progress on this front has been limited. Here we examined choice biases observed when two goods are offered sequentially. In the experiments, rhesus monkeys chose between different juices offered simultaneously or in sequence. Choices under sequential offers were less accurate (higher variability). They were also biased in favor of the second offer (order bias) and in favor of the preferred juice (preference bias). Analysis of neuronal activity recorded in the orbitofrontal cortex revealed that these phenomena emerged at different computational stages. Lower choice accuracy reflected weaker offer value signals (valuation stage), the order bias emerged during value comparison (decision stage), and the preference bias emerged late in the trial (post-comparison). By neuronal measures, each phenomenon reduced the value obtained on average in each trial and was thus costly to the monkey.
Data availability
Neuronal data and analysis scripts are deposited in GitHub: https://github.com/PadoaSchioppaLab/2022_eLife_choicebias
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Institute of Mental Health (R01-MH104494)
- Camillo Padoa-Schioppa
McDonnell Center for Systems Neuroscience (CCSN Fellowship)
- Weikang Shi
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All the experimental procedures adhered to the NIH Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals and were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) at Washington University (protocol number 190931).
Copyright
© 2022, Shi et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Further reading
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Accumulating evidence to make decisions is a core cognitive function. Previous studies have tended to estimate accumulation using either neural or behavioral data alone. Here we develop a unified framework for modeling stimulus-driven behavior and multi-neuron activity simultaneously. We applied our method to choices and neural recordings from three rat brain regions - the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), the frontal orienting fields (FOF), and the anterior-dorsal striatum (ADS) - while subjects performed a pulse-based accumulation task. Each region was best described by a distinct accumulation model, which all differed from the model that best described the animal's choices. FOF activity was consistent with an accumulator where early evidence was favored while the ADS reflected near perfect accumulation. Neural responses within an accumulation framework unveiled a distinct association between each brain region and choice. Choices were better predicted from all regions using a comprehensive, accumulation-based framework and different brain regions were found to differentially reflect choice-related accumulation signals: FOF and ADS both reflected choice but ADS showed more instances of decision vacillation. Previous studies relating neural data to behaviorally-inferred accumulation dynamics have implicitly assumed that individual brain regions reflect the whole-animal level accumulator. Our results suggest that different brain regions represent accumulated evidence in dramatically different ways and that accumulation at the whole-animal level may be constructed from a variety of neural-level accumulators.
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