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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Disentangling consistency and reward in repeated moral decisions with mouse tracking and fMRI

Xinyi Julia Xu¹, Haiyan Wu; ¹Universität Klinikum Eppendorf // University Hospital Eppendorf

Presenter: Xinyi Julia Xu

Tracking response history and current rewards is critical for making moral decisions. By integrating fMRI and mouse tracking (MT) with a value-based moral decision task, we quantify the level of choice conflict with the MT metric, and examine how individuals incorporate information from the response history to make repeated moral decisions. Our study uses response entropy and cumulative responses (CR) to define choice consistency on both the subject-level and trial-level. We find that a stronger correlation between choice conflict and response entropy is mediated by the weight of reward in decisions. On the neural level, the brain adapts to conflict over the experiment sessions, and the adaption in reward-related brain regions is linked to response entropy. Meanwhile, multivariate representations in cognitive control and self-referential brain regions encode the weight of relative reward and CR. Through understanding choice conflict and response history, our research sheds light on its significance in multi-trial moral decision-making from the consistency perspective. These findings lay the groundwork for studying the underlying mechanisms in repeated decision processes.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

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