RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Representations of Subjective Effort Cost
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 079467
DO 10.1101/079467
A1 Patrick S. Hogan
A1 Cary D. Frydman
A1 Joseph K. Galaro
A1 Vikram S. Chib
YR 2016
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/06/079467.abstract
AB How effortful an action feels critically shapes everyday decisions. Despite the importance of perceptions of effortfulness for making choices, the behavioral and neural representations of the subjective cost of physical effort are not well understood. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor brain activity while participants engaged in risky choices for prospective physical effort independent of reward. Behaviorally we found that participants exhibited increasing sensitivity to changes in subjective effort as objective effort levels increased. Moreover, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) encoded the subjective cost of prospective effort options and integrated these representations to facilitate decisions regarding effort expenditure. These results provide insight into human decision-making by showing how neural representations of feelings of effortfulness engender choices about exertion.