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

Decision-making reference point biases in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex

Demetrio Ferro¹, Habiba Azab², Benjamin Hayden, Rubén Moreno-Bote¹; ¹Universitat Pompeu Fabra, ²Baylor College of Medicine

Presenter: Demetrio Ferro

Probabilistic decision-making is influenced by many subjective factors, including reward seeking, risk acceptance, and satisfaction. A significant aspect, often overlooked in trial-based reward paradigms, is reference-point bias, consisting in the assessment of potential gains and losses based on a relative reference point, based on current wealth status (Kahneman & Tversky,1979). To address this gap, we set incremental reference points through the accumulation of virtual tokens leading to a fluid jackpot reward, and established their impact on behavioral performance and neural encoding in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) of macaque monkeys. As subjects accumulated more and more tokens, the trial execution approached the jackpot achievement. For higher accumulated tokens subjects exhibited faster and more accurate choices, indicating reference point-dependent behavior. Neuronal activity in the dACC corresponded with reward value during the visual presentation of offer cues, with enhanced encoding for higher ranges of accumulated tokens. Additionally, in easier trials where more valuable options were more salient, both decision-making speed and the neural representation of reward value were enhanced. These findings underscore the critical role of the dACC in integrating reward accumulation and decision-making processes, reflecting biases associated with reference point dependence.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

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