Journal article
Agency Modulates the Lateral and Medial Prefrontal Cortex Responses in Belief-Based Decision Making
PloS one, Vol.8(6), p.e65274
06/06/2013
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0065274
PMCID: PMC3675124
PMID: 23762332
Abstract
Many real-life decisions in complex and changing environments are guided by the decision maker's beliefs, such as her perceived control over decision outcomes (i.e., agency), leading to phenomena like the "illusion of control". However, the neural mechanisms underlying the "agency" effect on belief-based decisions are not well understood. Using functional imaging and a card guessing game, we revealed that the agency manipulation (i.e., either asking the subjects (SG) or the computer (CG) to guess the location of the winning card) not only affected the size of subjects' bets, but also their "world model" regarding the outcome dependency. Functional imaging results revealed that the decision-related activation in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) was significantly modulated by agency and previous outcome. Specifically, these PFC regions showed stronger activation when subjects made decisions after losses than after wins under the CG condition, but the pattern was reversed under the SG condition. Furthermore, subjects with high external attribution of negative events were more affected by agency at the behavioral and neural levels. These results suggest that the prefrontal decision-making system can be modulated by abstract beliefs, and are thus vulnerable to factors such as false agency and attribution.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Agency Modulates the Lateral and Medial Prefrontal Cortex Responses in Belief-Based Decision Making
- Creators
- Gui Xue - Beijing Normal UniversityQinghua He - University of Southern CaliforniaZhong-Lin Lu - The Ohio State UniversityIrwin P. Levin - University of IowaQi Dong - Beijing Normal UniversityAntoine Bechara - University of Southern California
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- PloS one, Vol.8(6), p.e65274
- DOI
- 10.1371/journal.pone.0065274
- PMID
- 23762332
- PMCID
- PMC3675124
- NLM abbreviation
- PLoS One
- ISSN
- 1932-6203
- eISSN
- 1932-6203
- Publisher
- Public Library Science
- Number of pages
- 11
- Grant note
- Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences R01 CA152062 / National Cancer Institute (NCI); United States Department of Health & Human Services; National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA; NIH National Cancer Institute (NCI) 31130025 / National Science Foundation of China; National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) R01 DA023051 / National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA); United States Department of Health & Human Services; National Institutes of Health (NIH) - USA; NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA)
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 06/06/2013
- Academic Unit
- Marketing; Psychological and Brain Sciences
- Record Identifier
- 9984963199002771
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