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Area of Science:

  • Neuroscience
  • Decision-making
  • Cognitive Psychology

Background:

  • Flexible instrumental control over the environment is crucial for adaptive decision-making.
  • Agency, formally indexed by instrumental divergence, reflects the ability to achieve desired outcomes by choosing between actions with distinct probability distributions.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the neural mechanisms underlying the preference for environments with greater instrumental divergence.
  • To determine if instrumental divergence has intrinsic utility, guiding decisions toward maximizing instrumental power.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized a formal index of agency: instrumental divergence.
  • Employed model-based functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in human participants.
  • Compared choice preferences using a model incorporating instrumental divergence against a conventional model based solely on monetary reward.

Main Results:

  • A model treating instrumental divergence as a reward surrogate better explained participants' choice preferences than a monetary reward-only model.
  • Activity in the rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and ventromedial PFC scaled with the divergence-based expected value.
  • Neural activity in these regions correlated with the influence of instrumental divergence on economic choices.

Conclusions:

  • Instrumental divergence possesses intrinsic utility, influencing decision-making beyond direct monetary payoffs.
  • Neural substrates in the PFC mediate the subjective value and motivational aspects of agency.
  • Findings suggest a neural common currency integrating information-theoretic and motivational variables.