Salience, Values, and Decisions

摘要

How does the brain make value-based decisions? There are two major competing models: the goods-based model and the action-based model of value. Leathers and Olson (p. 132) designed a critical experiment to decide between these two views. In the monkey brain, lateral intraparietal neurons responded strongly to stimuli predicting both large rewards and large penalties, encoding the salience of the stimulus rather than reward value, which refutes both models.