The Trouble with Choice: Studying Decision Variables in the Brain

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on challenge of studying the neurobiology of decision-making. Establishing causal links between neural responses and perceptual or cognitive phenomena is a fundamental challenge faced by researchers not only in neuroeconomics, but also in all of cognitive neuroscience. Historically, support for links between anatomy and function has come from patients or experimental animals with lesions restricted to the anatomic area of interest. Indeed, lesion studies first implicated ventromedial prefrontal cortex in value-based decision-making by demonstrating that damage to this region impaired performance on reward-cued reversal learning tasks and other tasks in which the best choice on each trial had to be inferred from the outcomes of earlier choices. Demonstrating neural correlates of a decision variable is, in principle, straightforward; it is substantially more challenging to prove that the correlated neural activity plays a causal role in the brain's decision-making process in the manner suggested by the proposed decision variable.