Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We assessed the neural substrates mediating a recentlydemonstrated preference for environments with high levels ofinstrumental divergence – a formal index of flexible operantcontrol. Across choice scenarios, participants chose betweengambling environments that differed in terms of bothinstrumental divergence and expected monetary pay-offs.Using model-based fMRI, we found that activity in theventromedial prefrontal cortex scaled with a divergence-based measure of expected utility that reflected the value ofboth divergence and monetary reward. Implications for aneural common currency for information theoretic andeconomic variables are discussed.