Medial frontal cortex activity predicts information sampling in economic choice

Abstract

Decision-making not only requires agents to decide what to choose, but also how much information to sample before committing to a choice. Previously established frameworks for economic choice argue for a deliberative process of evidence accumulation across time. These tacitly acknowledge a role of information sampling, in that decisions are only made once sufficient evidence is acquired, yet few experiments have explicitly placed information sampling under the participants control. Here, we use functional MRI to investigate the neural basis of information sampling in economic choice, by allowing participants to actively sample information in a multi-step decision task. We show that medial frontal cortex (MFC) activity is predictive of further information sampling prior to choice. Choice difficulty (inverse value difference) was also encoded in MFC, but this effect was explained away by the inclusion of information sampling as a co-regressor in the general linear model. A distributed network of regions across prefrontal cortex encoded key features of the sampled information at the time it was presented. We propose that MFC is an important controller of the extent to which information is gathered before committing to an economic choice. This role may explain why MFC activity has been associated with evidence accumulation in previous studies, in which information sampling was an implicit rather than explicit feature of the decision.