Prefrontal cortex, cognitive control, and the registration of decision costs

McGuire, Joseph T.; Botvinick, Matthew · 2010 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0910662107

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Summary

This study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying the registration of internal decision costs, specifically how the brain evaluates the subjective effort associated with cognitively demanding choices. Human decision-making is often characterized by a tendency to avoid computationally intensive tasks, suggesting that individuals balance the desire for optimal outcomes against the disutility of mental effort. While previous research has established that people prefer to minimize demands on executive control, the specific neural processes responsible for evaluating these internal costs remained unclear. The authors hypothesized that activity in brain regions subserving executive control, particularly the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and dorsomedial frontal cortex (DMFC), would correlate with the subjective experience of decision costs. To test this hypothesis, the researchers conducted two functional MRI (fMRI) experiments using a task-switching paradigm, which requires participants to alternate between judging the magnitude or parity of digits. In Experiment 1, ten participants performed blocks of trials and provided self-report ratings of their desire to avoid future blocks from the same stimulus source, serving as a measure of experienced cost. In Experiment 2, twenty-two participants performed high- and low-demand versions of the task inside the scanner, followed by a behavioral demand selection task outside the scanner to measure individual differences in avoidance behavior. Crucially, the analyses in both experiments controlled for reaction time and error rates to isolate the neural correlates of subjective cost from overt performance metrics. The results demonstrated that LPFC activity positively correlated with self-reported avoidance tendencies in Experiment 1 and with behavioral avoidance biases in Experiment 2. These relationships persisted even after partialling out the effects of reaction time and errors, indicating that LPFC activity reflects subjectively experienced costs rather than mere response difficulty. In contrast, DMFC activity showed no relationship to decision costs independent of overt performance; its activity was linked primarily to error commission and reaction time. Further analysis confirmed that LPFC, but not DMFC, tracked the evaluation of decision costs when performance variables were accounted for. These findings imply that the registration of decision costs is tied to the degree of engagement of top-down control mechanisms in the LPFC, rather than to performance monitoring functions in the DMFC. The study suggests that humans experience a drive to be "cognitive misers," minimizing the exertion of cognitive control. This distinction clarifies the functional roles of prefrontal subregions, positioning LPFC as critical for evaluating the internal cost of control engagement, which may influence strategy selection and effort-accuracy tradeoffs in complex decision-making contexts.

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• executive function