Value-Based decision-making
‘Do you prefer a macaroon or an oyster?’
While this question is simple for us to answer, the cognitive and neural processes allowing us to make such a choice remain unclear. During my PhD (2012-2016) with Mathias Pessiglione, head of the Motivation, Brain and Behavior team (MBB) at the ICM, I investigated the neural bases of decisions based on preferences.
The Brain Valuation System and its role in decision-making
During my PhD, I conducted three studies. First, we investigated and compared three behavioral ways to have access to subjective values. We found that subjective values were relatively robust to the way they were elicited (Lopez-Persem et al. Plos Computational Biology 2017). We then investigated the properties of the Brain Valuation System (BVS) in humans in a large dataset of intra-EEG recordings in epileptic patients. We identified four properties : baseline dependency, genericity, automaticity and quadraticity (confidence representation) (Lopez-Persem et al. Nature Neuroscience 2020). Additionally, we investigated how this brain network was involved during binary choices. We found that prior preference influenced the BVS baseline activity and that decision value was expressed by the vmPFC in a frame set up by prior preferences (Lopez-Persem et al. eLife 2016).
Altogether, these findings shed light on the distinct cognitive mechanisms underlying value-based decision-making i) by exploring the neural properties of value assignment and ii) by proposing a general solution to the neural implementation of the comparison between option values. We believe this demonstration points to hidden default policies as sources of bias in choices.
Make a choice!
If you want to know more about Value-Based Decision-Making, click on the food item that you would prefer to eat now:
