The Rostrolateral Prefrontal Cortex Mediates a Preference for High-Agency Environments.

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.