Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

Economic decision-making under risk - the process of selecting between options with different values and uncertain outcomes - concerns many aspects of our lives. Past studies demonstrated representations of economic decision variables in prefrontal cortical regions (PFC). These studies, however, either measured neural signals with coarse spatial and temporal resolution (e.g. using fMRI) or from small neural populations using electrophysiology. Therefore, it is unclear how neural populations across PFC encode economic decisions. To address this, we devised a two-alternative visual economic decision-making task in head-fixed mice. We found that mice’s choices were sensitive to expected value and observed diverse risk attitudes across mice. Using high-density large-scale electrophysiological recordings, we show that neural populations across various frontal regions encode economic value, albeit with graded strength. Moreover, we show that neural economic value representations depend on individual risk attitudes. Our work reveals graded representations of economic value across PFC, and provides a platform for investigating the neural basis of economic decision-making at a large scale with high spatial and temporal resolution.