Chapter 14 Summary

Concepts derived from cognitive neuroscience and behavioral economics interact usefully in the emerging discipline of neuroeconomics.
In decision making, one option is selected from a set on the basis of prior knowledge, expectations about outcomes, and preferences about potential rewards.
Early research in economics combined ideas about expected value and probability weighting to create expected-utility models of rational decision makers. More recent economic research incorporates ideas from psychology about heuristics and biases, in recognition that many real-world decisions show systematic deviations from rational choice models.
Information about the risk associated with a decision modulates activation in control regions within prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as in the insular cortex.
Single-unit recording studies from dopaminergic midbrain neurons and their projection targets in the basal ganglia and cortex indicate that many such neurons show increases in activity to unexpected positive reinforcers, and to cues that predict future reinforcers. These changes in activity have been described as signaling a reward prediction error that reflects information about rewards, but not necessarily rewards themselves.
The key challenge in decision making comes from the integration of diverse information (e.g., different reward types, risk, social context) into a common currency for decision making. Research now indicates that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex plays an important role in the reward integration process.