ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Testing models at the neural level reveals how the brain computes subjective value.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- Subjective Values in Decision-Making Under Uncertainty: A Systematic Review.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Parental substance use history density and its influence on reward anticipation brain activation in late childhood and early adolescence.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Article
- Interpretation of individual differences in computational neuroscience using a latent input approach.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2025Review
- Article
- Social Risk Coding by Amygdala Activity and Connectivity with the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Representation of Anticipated Rewards and Punishments in the Human Brain.Annual review of psychology · 2025Review
- Article
- Neural reward system reflects individual value comparison strategy in cost-benefit decisions.Communications biology · 2024Article
- The Field of Evolutionary Neuroscience: A Commentary on "Rethinking Norm Psychology" by Cecilia Heyes.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- The parietal cortex has a causal role in ambiguity computations in humans.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- Prior probability biases perceptual choices by modulating the accumulation rate, rather than the baseline, of decision evidence.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- The rat frontal orienting field dynamically encodes value for economic decisions under risk.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Review
- Neural bases of reward anticipation in healthy individuals with low, mid, and high levels of schizotypy.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Decisions are based on the subjective values of choice options. However, subjective value is a theoretical construct and not directly observable. Strikingly, distinct theoretical models competing to explain how subjective values are assigned to choice options often make very similar behavioral predictions, which poses a major difficulty for establishing a mechanistic, biologically plausible explanation of decision-making based on behavior alone. Here, we demonstrate that model comparison at the neural level provides insights into model implementation during subjective value computation even though the distinct models parametrically identify common brain regions as computing subjective value. We show that frontal cortical regions implement a model based on the statistical distributions of available rewards, whereas intraparietal cortex and striatum compute subjective value signals according to a model based on distortions in the representations of probabilities. Thus, better mechanistic understanding of how cognitive processes are implemented arises from model comparisons at the neural level, over and above the traditional approach of comparing models at the behavioral level alone.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.