Kable, Joseph W
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Publication Rational Temporal Predictions Can Underlie Apparent Failures to Delay Gratification(2013-01-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph WAn important category of seemingly maladaptive decisions involves failure to postpone gratification. A person pursuing a desirable long-run outcome may abandon it in favor of a short-run alternative that has been available all along. Here we present a theoretical framework in which this seemingly irrational behavior emerges from stable preferences and veridical judgments. Our account recognizes that decision makers generally face uncertainty regarding the time at which future outcomes will materialize. When timing is uncertain, the value of persistence depends crucially on the nature of a decision maker's prior temporal beliefs. Certain forms of temporal beliefs imply that a delay's predicted remaining length increases as a function of time already waited. In this type of situation, the rational, utility-maximizing strategy is to persist for a limited amount of time and then give up. We show empirically that people's explicit predictions of remaining delay lengths indeed increase as a function of elapsed time in several relevant domains, implying that temporal judgments offer a rational basis for limiting persistence. We then develop our framework into a simple working model and show how it accounts for individual differences in a laboratory task (the well-known “marshmallow test”). We conclude that delay-of-gratification failure, generally viewed as a manifestation of limited self-control capacity, can instead arise as an adaptive response to the perceived statistics of one's environment.Publication Fractionating the Left Frontal Response to Tools: Dissociable Effects of Motor Experience and Lexical Competition(2006-02-01) Kable, Joseph W; Kan, Irene P; Van Scoyoc, Amanda; Thompson-Schill, Sharon L.; Chatterjee, AnjanA number of theories about the evolution of language posit a close (and perhaps causal) relationship between tool use and speech. Consistent with this idea, neuroimaging studies have found that tool knowledge retrieval activates not only a region of the left premotor cortex involved in hand action, but also an adjacent region that is typically described as a language center. We examined whether this pattern of activation is best described as the result of a single process, related to both action and language, or the result of two independent processes. We identified two distinct neural components that jointly contribute to this response: a posterior region centered in the premotor cortex, which responds to motor knowledge retrieval, and an anterior region centered in the left frontal operculum, which responds to lexical competition. Crucial to the interpretation of the premotor response, individual variation in motor experience was highly correlated with the magnitude of the response in the premotor cortex, but not in the prefrontal cortex.Publication The Neural Correlated of Subjective Value During Intertemporal Choice(2007-01-01) Kable, Joseph W; Glimcher, Paul WNeuroimaging studies of decision-making have generally related neural activity to objective measures (such as reward magnitude, probability or delay), despite choice preferences being subjective. However, economic theories posit that decision-makers behave as though different options have different subjective values. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that neural activity in several brain regions—particularly the ventral striatum, medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex—tracks the revealed subjective value of delayed monetary rewards. This similarity provides unambiguous evidence that the subjective value of potential rewards is explicitly represented in the human brain.Publication Individual Differences in the Neural Signature of Subjective Value Among Older Adults(2015-06-17) Halfmann, Kameko; Hedgcock, William; Kable, Joseph W; Denburg, Natalie LSome healthy older adults show departures from standard decision-making patterns exhibited by younger adults. We asked if such departures are uniform or if heterogeneous aging processes can designate which older adults show differing decision patterns. Thirty-three healthy older adults with varying decision-making patterns on a complex decision task (the Iowa Gambling Task) completed an intertemporal choice task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. We examined whether value representation in the canonical valuation network differed across older adults based on complex decision-making ability. Older adults with advantageous decision patterns showed increased activity in the valuation network, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and striatum. In contrast, older adults with disadvantageous decision patterns showed reduced or absent activation in the VMPFC and striatum, and these older adults also showed greater blood oxygen level dependent signal temporal variability in the striatum. Our results suggest that a reduced representation of value in the brain, possibly driven by increased neural noise, relates to suboptimal decision-making in a subset of older adults, which could translate to poor decision-making in many aspects of life, including finance, health and long-term care. Understanding the connection between suboptimal decision-making and neural value signals is a step toward mitigating age-related decision-making impairments.Publication Neural Markers of Individual Differences in Decision-making(2015-08-01) Kable, Joseph W; Levy, IfatIn the last few years, neuroscientists have begun to identify associations between individual differences in decision-making and features of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. Different tendencies in decision making, such as tolerance for risk, delay or effort, have been linked to various neurobiological measures, such as morphometry, structural connectivity, functional connectivity or the function of neurotransmitter systems. Though far from immutable, these neural features may nonetheless be suitable as relatively stable biomarkers for different decision traits. The establishment of such markers would achieve one of the stated goals of neuroeconomics, which is to improve the prediction of economic behavior across different contexts.Publication Deciding to Curtail Persistence(2016-01-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph WImagine that a few seconds ago you called a restaurant to book a reservation and were placed on hold. How soon do you expect to be helped? Are you having any difficulty waiting? Now imagine 5 minutes have gone by and you are still hearing hold music. Is it getting more difficult? Have your expectations changed? How much longer will you give them? Voluntary persistence toward delayed rewards has often been framed, in the psychological literature, as a self-control problem. This view presumes that it is generally beneficial to direct one's behavior toward valuable prospects in the future, but that the fallible nature of self-control makes people sometimes succumb to immediate temptations instead. In laboratory studies, individuals who wait longer for delayed rewards have been deemed to possess greater self-control capacity. In real life, though, how long it is worth holding out for future rewards can be a more vexed question. Not all long-run rewards is complicated by the fact that future events are uncertain in both their substance and their timing. When it comes to choosing how long to wait for everything from city buses to customer service representatives, decision makers can as easily err by waiting too long--chasing sunk costs-- as by waiting too little. In this chapter we review research suggesting that the challenge of delaying gratification does not emerge merely from psychological limitations but instead reflects the genuine complexity of the environments in which real-world decisions take place.Publication Functionally Dissociable Influences on Learning Rate in a Dynamic Environment(2014-11-19) McGuire, Joseph T; Nassar, Matthew R; Kable, Joseph W; Gold, Joshua IMaintaining accurate beliefs in a changing environment requires dynamically adapting the rate at which one learns from new experiences. Beliefs should be stable in the face of noisy data but malleable in periods of change or uncertainty. Here we used computational modeling, psychophysics, and fMRI to show that adaptive learning is not a unitary phenomenon in the brain. Rather, it can be decomposed into three computationally and neuroanatomically distinct factors that were evident in human subjects performing a spatial-prediction task: (1) surprise-driven belief updating, related to BOLD activity in visual cortex; (2) uncertainty-driven belief updating, related to anterior prefrontal and parietal activity; and (3) reward-driven belief updating, a context-inappropriate behavioral tendency related to activity in ventral striatum. These distinct factors converged in a core system governing adaptive learning. This system, which included dorsomedial frontal cortex, responded to all three factors and predicted belief updating both across trials and across individuals.Publication Cognitive Neuroscience Methods: An Introductory Overview for Social Scientists(2017-01-01) Parthasarathi, Trishala; Kable, Joseph WA challenge to doing interdisciplinary research is developing a solid understanding of the methods used by different fields. This challenge is particularly acute when the methods may be technologically complex. This chapter provides and introductory overview of the methods of cognitive neuroscience. This overview is intended for the people who are new to the field and who have very little, if any, knowledge of cognitive neuroscience techniques. Though the primary goal is to provide social scientists who are interested in bribery the necessary foundation to understand subsequent chapters that use these techniques, a broader aim is to also spark ideas about how future research could use neuroscience to better inform our understanding of bribery.Publication The Cognitive Neuroscience Toolkit for the Neuroeconomist: A Functional Overview(2011-01-01) Kable, Joseph WThis article provides the beginning neuroeconomist with an introductory overview to the different methods used in human neuroscience. It describes basic strengths and weaknesses of each technique, points to examples of how each technique has been used in neuroeconomic studies, and provides key tutorial references that contain more detailed information. In addition to this overview, the article presents a framework that organizes human neuroscience methods functionally, according to whether they provide tests of the association between brain activity and cognition or behavior, or whether they test the necessity or the sufficiency of brain activity for cognition and behavior. This framework demonstrates the utility of a multimethod research approach, because converging evidence from tests of association, necessity, and sufficiency provides the strongest inference regarding brain–behavior relationships. Set against this goal of converging evidence, human neuroscience studies in neuroeconomics currently rely far too heavily on methods that test association, most notably functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).Publication Common and Unique Representations in pFC for Place Attractiveness(2015-05-01) Kable, Joseph W; Pegors, Teresa K; Chatterjee, Anjan; Epstein, Russell AAlthough previous neuroimaging research has identified overlapping correlates of subjective value across different reward types in the ventromedial pFC (vmPFC), it is not clear whether this “common currency” evaluative signal extends to the aesthetic domain. To examine this issue, we scanned human participants with fMRI while they made attractiveness judgments of faces and places—two stimulus categories that are associated with different underlying rewards, have very different visual properties, and are rarely compared with each other. We found overlapping signals for face and place attractiveness in the vmPFC, consistent with the idea that this region codes a signal for value that applies across disparate reward types and across both economic and aesthetic judgments. However, we also identified a subregion of vmPFC within which activity patterns for face and place attractiveness were distinguishable, suggesting that some category-specific attractiveness information is retained in this region. Finally, we observed two separate functional regions in lateral OFC: one region that exhibited a category-unique response to face attractiveness and another region that responded strongly to faces but was insensitive to their value. Our results suggest that vmPFC supports a common mechanism for reward evaluation while also retaining a degree of category-specific information, whereas lateral OFC may be involved in basic reward processing that is specific to only some stimulus categories.