Journal article
Activity in Inferior Parietal and Medial Prefrontal Cortex Signals the Accumulation of Evidence in a Probability Learning Task
Mathieu d'Acremont, Eleonora Fornari, Peter Bossaerts
PLOS COMPUTATIONAL BIOLOGY | PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE | Published : 2013
Abstract
In an uncertain environment, probabilities are key to predicting future events and making adaptive choices. However, little is known about how humans learn such probabilities and where and how they are encoded in the brain, especially when they concern more than two outcomes. During functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), young adults learned the probabilities of uncertain stimuli through repetitive sampling. Stimuli represented payoffs and participants had to predict their occurrence to maximize their earnings. Choices indicated loss and risk aversion but unbiased estimation of probabilities. BOLD response in medial prefrontal cortex and angular gyri increased linearly with the probab..
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Funding Acknowledgements
The study was supported by the AXA Insurance Research Fund, Centre d'Imagerie BioMedicale of the University of Lausanne, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, University of Geneva, Hopitaux Universitaires de Geneve, the Leenaards and Jeantet Foundations, and the Swiss Finance Institute. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.