Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience

The amount of risk inherent in any decision can be defined as the amount of uncertainty about predicted reward. Previous neuroimaging studies have shown that the anterior insula and dorsal striatum encode the uncertainty of decisional outcomes. Here we show that single neuron activity recorded from the brains of human subjects encodes the amount of predicted uncertainty in response to a cue and then reverses that encoding in response to delivered reward. These results provide insight into the computations that human neurons perform in calculating decision related risk.