Primate prefrontal neurons signal economic risk derived from the statistics of recent reward experience.

ABSTRACT: Risk derives from the variation of rewards and governs economic decisions, yet how the brain calculates risk from the frequency of experienced events, rather than from explicit risk-descriptive cues, remains unclear. Here, we investigated whether neurons in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex process risk derived from reward experience. Monkeys performed in a probabilistic choice task in which the statistical variance of experienced rewards evolved continually. During these choices, prefrontal neurons signaled the reward-variance associated with specific objects ('object risk') or actions ('action risk'). Crucially, risk was not derived from explicit, risk-descriptive cues but calculated internally from the variance of recently experienced rewards. Support-vector-machine decoding demonstrated a

SUBMITTER: Grabenhorst F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6658165 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature