Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Research suggests that the exercise of control is desirable and adaptive, but the precise mechanisms underlying the affective value of control are not well understood. The study reported here characterized the affective experience of personal control by examining the neural substrates recruited when individuals anticipate the opportunity to make a choice—in other words, when they anticipate the means for exercising control. We used an experimental paradigm that probed the value of having a choice. Participants reported liking cues that predicted a future opportunity to make a choice more than cues that predicted no choice. The anticipation of choice itself was associated with increased activity in corticostriatal regions, particularly the ventral striatum, involved in affective and motivational processes. This study is the first direct examination of the affective value of having the opportunity to choose. These findings have important implications for understanding the role of perception of control, and choice itself, in self-regulatory processes.

Keywords

MRI striatum anticipation choice perceived control reward

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Arana

F. S.

Parkinson

J. A.

Hinton

Holland

A. J.

Owen

A. M.

Roberts

A. C.

(2003). Dissociable contributions of the human amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex to incentive motivation and goal selection. Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 9632–9638.

Bandura

Caprara

G. V.

Barbaranelli

Gerbino

Pastorelli

(2003). Role of affective self-regulatory efficacy in diverse spheres of psychosocial functioning. Child Development, 74, 769–782.

Bjork

J. M.

Hommer

D. W.

(2007). Anticipating instrumentally obtained and passively-received rewards: A factorial fMRI investigation. Behavioural Brain Research, 177, 165–170.

Botvinick

M. M.

Cohen

J. D.

Carter

C. S.

(2004). Conflict monitoring and anterior cingulate cortex: An update. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 539–546.

Bown

N. J.

Read

Summers

(2003). The lure of choice. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 16, 297–308.

Delgado

M. R.

(2007). Reward-related responses in the human striatum. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1104, 70–88.

Delgado

M. R.

Nystrom

L. E.

Fissell

Noll

D. C.

Fiez

J. A.

(2000). Tracking the hemodynamic responses to reward and punishment in the striatum. Journal of Neurophysiology, 84, 3072–3077.

Haber

S. N.

Knutson

(2010). The reward circuit: Linking primate anatomy and human imaging. Neuropsychopharmacology, 35, 4–26.

Hsu

Bhatt

Adolphs

Tranel

Camerer

C. F.

(2005). Neural systems responding to degrees of uncertainty in human decision-making. Science, 310, 1680–1683.

10.

Knutson

Adams

C. M.

Fong

G. W.

Hommer

(2001). Anticipation of increasing monetary reward selectively recruits nucleus accumbens. Journal of Neuroscience, 21, RC159.

11.

Knutson

Taylor

Kaufman

Peterson

Glover

(2005). Distributed neural representation of expected value. Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 4806–4812.

12.

Langer

E. J.

(1975). The illusion of control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 311–328.

13.

Langer

E. J.

Rodin

(1976). The effects of choice and enhanced personal responsibility for the aged: A field experiment in an institutional setting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 34, 191–198.

14.

Leotti

L. A.

Iyengar

S. S.

Ochsner

K. N.

(2010). Born to choose: The origins and value of the need for control. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14, 457–463.

15.

Montague

Berns

(2002). Neural economics and the biological substrates of valuation. Neuron, 36, 265–284.

16.

O’Doherty

J. P.

(2004). Reward representations and reward-related learning in the human brain: Insights from neuroimaging. Current Opinions in Neurobiology, 14, 769–776.

17.

O’Doherty

J. P.

Critchley

Deichmann

Dolan

R. J.

(2003). Dissociating valence of outcome from behavioral control in human orbital and ventral prefrontal cortices. Journal of Neuroscience, 23, 7931–7939.

18.

O’Doherty

J. P.

Dayan

Schultz

Deichmann

Friston

Dolan

R. J.

(2004). Dissociable roles of ventral and dorsal striatum in instrumental conditioning. Science, 304, 452–454.

19.

Rangel

Camerer

Montague

P. R.

(2008). A framework for studying the neurobiology of value-based decision making. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 9, 545–556.

20.

Robbins

T. W.

Everitt

B. J.

(1996). Neurobehavioural mechanisms of reward and motivation. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 6, 228–236.

21.

Rushworth

M. F.

Walton

M. E.

Kennerley

S. W.

Bannerman

D. M.

(2004). Action sets and decisions in the medial frontal cortex. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 410–417.

22.

Ryan

R. M.

Deci

E. L.

(2006). Self-regulation and the problem of human autonomy: Does psychology need choice, self-determination, and will? Journal of Personality, 74, 1557–1585.

23.

Sanfey

A. G.

Loewenstein

McClure

S. M.

Cohen

J. D.

(2006). Neuroeconomics: Cross-currents in research on decision-making. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 10, 108–116.

24.

Sarinopoulos

Grupe

D. W.

Mackiewicz

K. L.

Herrington

J. D.

Lor

Steege

E. E.

Nitschke

J. B.

(2009). Uncertainty during anticipation modulates neural responses to aversion in human insula and amygdala. Cerebral Cortex, 20, 929–940.

25.

Seymour

Daw

Dayan

Singer

Dolan

(2007). Differential encoding of losses and gains in the human striatum. Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 4826–4831.

26.

Shapiro

D. H.

Schwartz

C. E.

Astin

J. A.

(1996). Controlling ourselves, controlling our world. Psychology’s role in understanding positive and negative consequences of seeking and gaining control. American Journal of Psychology, 51, 1213–1230.

27.

Sharot

De Martino

Dolan

R. J.

(2009). How choice reveals and shapes expected hedonic outcome. Journal of Neuroscience, 29, 3760–3765.

28.

Suzuki

(1997). Effects of number of alternatives on choice in humans. Behavioural Processes, 39, 205–214.

29.

Suzuki

(1999). Selection of force- and free-choice by monkeys. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 88, 242–250.

30.

Thompson

(1999). Illusions of control: How we overestimate our personal influence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8, 187–190.

31.

Tobler

P. N.

O’Doherty

J. P.

Dolan

R. J.

Schultz

(2007). Reward value coding distinct from risk attitude-related uncertainty coding in human reward systems. Journal of Neurophysiology, 97, 1621–1632.

32.

Tom

S. M.

Fox

C. R.

Trepel

Poldrack

R. A.

(2007). The neural basis of loss aversion in decision-making under risk. Science, 315, 515–518.

33.

Tricomi

E. M.

Delgado

M. R.

Fiez

J. A.

(2004). Modulation of caudate activity by action contingency. Neuron, 41, 281–292.

34.

Whalen

P. J.

(2007). The uncertainty of it all. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11, 499–500.

35.

Yacubian

Glascher

Schroeder

Sommer

Braus

D. F.

Buchel

(2006). Dissociable systems for gain- and loss-related value predictions and errors of prediction in the human brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 9530–9537.

36.

Zink

C. F.

Pagnoni

Martin-Skurski

M. E.

Chappelow

J. C.

Berns

G. S.

(2004). Human striatal responses to monetary reward depend on saliency. Neuron, 42, 509–517.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.23 MB

The Inherent Reward of Choice

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References

Supplementary Material