Research at the Center

Risk Preferences

“Since people and animals often demonstrate strong attractions or aversions to options with uncertain rewards, risk preference provides a promising behavioral paradigm for exploring neural mechanisms underlying decision-making, and offers a potential way to dissociate subjective value from objective rewards.”

Read the Nature Neuroscience paper (PDF)
Read Daeyeol Lee's comments on this work (PDF)

Since the 18th century, it has been known that people’s choices reflect reward uncertainty as well as reward value. When confronted with two options of the same mean value but differing in uncertainty, both people and animals typically avoid choosing the uncertain, or risky, option. The idea that subjective preferences guide decision-making has since become a core concept in the decision sciences, yet the neural mechanisms that generate such preferences and turn them into action remains largely unexplored.

Since people and animals often demonstrate strong attractions or aversions to options with uncertain rewards, risk preference provides a promising behavioral paradigm for exploring neural mechanisms underlying decision-making, and offers a potential way to dissociate subjective value from objective rewards. Specifically, neurons participating in the decision process should be sensitive to subjective risk preferences, even when available options have the same objective value.

In an initial test of this prediction, we recorded from single neurons in posterior cingulate cortex (CGp), a limbic area linking reward with spatial attention and orienting. Two adult male rhesus macaques performed a visual gambling task in which they chose between two visual targets offering the same mean reward but differing in reward uncertainty. We found that monkeys preferred orienting to targets offering uncertain rewards, and neuronal activity in CGp reflected these risk preferences. Our data suggest that neuronal responses in CGp signal subjective spatial biases that guide orienting.