Biology subjects

Kable, J. W.

Publications and source records attributed to Kable, J. W..

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Electrophysiological dissociation of human posterior cingulate cortex contributions to value- and memory-based decision-making

The human posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) is routinely implicated in cognition and disease, yet its specific functional contributions remain unclear. Historically, human neuroimaging has linked the region to episodic memory and the default mode network, while a distinct non-human primate electrophysiology literature has focused on economic decision-making. Integrating anatomical evidence with these literatures, it has recently been proposed that this divergence reflects subregional organization, with dorsal PCC as a potential convergence site for value-based and memory-based decisions. Here, we recorded local field potentials (LFPs) and single units from human PCC while the same participants performed matched value- and memory-based decision tasks. LFPs in dorsal but not ventral PCC showed sustained engagement across both tasks, with risk sensitivity emerging only after the decision. In contrast, single-unit activity was more temporally circumscribed and could be grouped into response profiles active before or after the decision. Dorsal but not ventral PCC engagement further extended to memory encoding, recognition, and confidence judgments. Together, these findings reveal a consistent functional dissociation, identifying dorsal PCC as a domain-general interface between evaluative and mnemonic systems. In doing so, they align human and non-human primate accounts of PCC function and help orient future targeted studies of its role in cognition and disease.

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bioRxiv2026

Effects of dopamine and serotonin on persistence for delayed rewards in humans

People often must decide how long to continue waiting for rewards that will arrive at an uncertain time in the future. We propose that these persistence decisions involve weighing the benefits of continued waiting against opportunity costs of waiting, a balance that may shift over time. This framework suggests that persistence decisions share neural mechanisms with foraging decisions, which require ongoing comparisons between a current resource and possible alternatives. Dopamine and serotonin have been proposed to play opposing roles in foraging, with dopamine promoting exploration and serotonin promoting exploitation. Here we investigated their roles in persistence. In a within-subjects, double-blind, placebo-controlled study in young adults (n = 42), we examined the effects of increasing dopamine with L-dopa and increasing serotonin with escitalopram. We predicted that L-dopa would decrease persistence and escitalopram would increase it. Participants also completed patch-foraging, time perception, risk tolerance, and temporal discounting tasks to explore potential mechanisms of drug effects on persistence. Escitalopram increased persistence, after adjusting for the effects of anxiety and condition order, such that participants waited longer for rewards after taking the serotonergic drug. L-dopa did not influence persistence. In exploratory analyses controlling for age, however, L-dopa reduced persistence and increased exploration in foraging.

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bioRxiv2026

Suboptimal human inference reflects an efficient and flexible information bottleneck

Human inference is often suboptimal in ways that vary across individuals and tasks. We propose that at least some of this variability reflects information-processing limits. To test this idea, we developed a task-general application of the information-bottleneck framework to quantify how much information individuals use (information capacity) and how effectively they use it (information efficiency). We applied this framework to human choice behavior on two distinct inference tasks and found that individual differences in performance were driven largely by variation in information capacity, while information efficiency remained consistently high. This pattern of variable capacity and high efficiency also applied to a subset of participants who appeared inefficient overall, but were efficient when evaluated relative to a simplified (heuristic) encoding of the observations. Regardless of whether participants based their strategies on full or simplified encodings, they tended to adjust their performance to different task demands by changing their information capacity while maintaining efficiency. We interpret these findings in terms of new analytical results linking optimal inference under information-capacity constraints to evidence-based choice noise, suggesting that a key driver of human behavioral variability is rational adaptation to flexible information-processing limits.

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bioRxiv2025

Subliminal beauty engages the brain's valuation circuits

Neuroeconomic models propose that the anterior ventral striatum (aVS) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are key regions for computing subjective value (SV) signals that guide choice. However, the role of conscious awareness in this process remains debated. Here we examined whether SV can be automatically computed in these regions without conscious awareness. In an fMRI experiment, participants viewed faces that varied in attractiveness under three conditions: (i) suppressed from awareness via continuous flash suppression (CFS), (ii) clearly visible without suppression, or (iii) absent (background only) with CFS. Participants reported trial-wise facial identity (objective) and visibility (subjective) measures of facial awareness. In a post-fMRI session, they rated the attractiveness of each face as a measure of SV. When faces were seen, task performance (d) exceeded chance and responses were faster than in absent trials. When faces were unseen, performance was at chance but responses were slower than absent trials. Neurally, seen and unseen faces elicited greater neural signal than absent trials and showed similar neural patterns in the fusiform face area (FFA). Critically, neural signal in vmPFC correlated with SV for both seen and unseen faces, with similar neural patterns. In aVS, SV-related signal was only observed for unseen faces. Furthermore, mean face-related signal in FFA correlated with SV-related signals in aVS and vmPFC for unseen faces. These findings demonstrate that SV can be automatically computed in aVS and vmPFC without conscious awareness, suggesting a neural pathway by which subliminal information can influence value-based choice.

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bioRxiv2025

The precision of hippocampal representations predicts incremental value-learning across the adult lifespan

Correctly assigning value to different options and leveraging this information to guide choice is a cornerstone of adaptive decision-making. Reinforcement learning (RL) has provided a computational framework to study this process, and neural signals linked to RL have been identified in the striatum and medial prefrontal cortex. More recently, hippocampal contributions to this kind of value-learning have been proposed, at least under some conditions. Here, we test whether the hippocampus provides a signal of the options identity that aids in credit assignment when learning about several perceptually similar items, and evaluate how this process differs across the lifespan. A sample of 251 younger and older adults, including a subset (n = 76) with simultaneous fMRI, completed an RL task in which they learned the value of four houses through trial-and-error. Older adults showed decreased choice accuracy, accompanied by reduced neural signaling of value at choice but not feedback. Using representational similarity analysis, we found that the precision with which choice options were represented in the posterior hippocampus during choice predicted accurate decisions across age groups. Interestingly, despite previous evidence for neural de-differentiation in older adults, we found no support for a "blurring" of these stimulus representations in older adults. Rather, we observed reduced connectivity between the posterior hippocampus and the medial PFC in older adults, and this connectivity correlated with choice consistency. Taken together, these findings identify a hippocampal contribution to incremental value learning, and that reductions in incremental value learning in older adults are associated with the reduced transfer of information between the hippocampus and mPFC, rather than the precision of the information in the hippocampus itself.

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bioRxiv2025

Subliminal risk influences subjective value in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

The relationship between conscious awareness and decisions has been heavily debated. Here we investigated whether subliminal probabilities are integrated with conscious rewards to form subjective value (SV) representations in the anterior ventral striatum (aVS) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Participants played an incentivized competitive game with risky choice to accumulate points across trials in a behavioral and fMRI experiment. The game was a modified attentional-blink paradigm that rendered a probability cue unseen (indicating a 100% or 0% chance to win a risky reward). Following the probability cue, participants chose between a safe (1 point with certainty) or risky option (>1 or 0 points depending on probability cue). The risky reward was either 2 or 5 points, varying across trials. In some trials the probability cue was absent (replaced by a random distractor) and the probability to win the risky reward was 50%. When probability cues were unseen, they did not influence choice, as value-maximizing choice (d) was not greater than chance, but they did influence reaction time in both experiments. Consistent with SV integration, the BOLD signal in aVS and vmPFC was higher for both conscious rewards (high > low) and subliminal probabilities (high > low) and could not be explained by subliminal salience (cue present > absent). Moreover, multivariate pattern similarity between conscious rewards and subliminal probabilities in vmPFC suggest integration into an abstract value representation. Additionally, we found brain-wide subliminal probability and salience effects. Taken together, these results suggest that conscious awareness is not necessary for probability to be integrated with conscious rewards to form an abstract "common currency" SV representation in vmPFC. Additionally, brain-wide subliminal probability and salience effects suggests information can have "global access" without conscious awareness.

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bioRxiv2024

Neural correlates of age-related changes in social decisions from episodic memory

Older adults are frequent victims of financial scams. Previous behavioral research suggests that this may be due to systematic biases in how they make decisions about whom to trust: for instance, Lempert et al. (2022) found that relative to younger adults, older adults were more likely to base decisions about whether to re-engage with someone on how generous that person looked, rather than on their memory for how they had previously behaved. Here, we aimed to identify the neural correlates of these age-dependent changes in social decision-making in order to clarify the mechanism by which they emerge. Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), we measured neural activity while a total of 86 participants - 45 younger and 41 older adults - learned about how much of a $10 endowment an individual, represented by a picture of their face, was willing to share with them in a dictator game. After this encoding phase, participants then made decisions about whom they wanted to play another round of the dictator game with. In line with previous findings, we found that older adults did not reliably prefer to re-engage with people who had proven themselves to be generous. This bias was the result of several factors: (1) older adults had worse associative memory for how much each person had shared, possibly due to an age-dependent decrease in neural activity in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) during encoding, (2) older adults had a stronger tendency to re-engage with familiar over novel faces regardless of their past behavior, and (3) while activity in value-responsive brain regions tracked with how generous a face looked across the age range, older adults were less able to inhibit the influence of these irrelevant perceptual features when it was necessary to do so. In line with this behavioral effect, younger adults showed greater activation in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) during choices that required suppressing irrelevant perceptual features in favor of associative memory. Taken together, our findings highlight age-dependent changes in both the ability to encode relevant information and to adaptively deploy it in service of social decisions.

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bioRxiv2024

Multivariate analysis of multimodal brain structure predicts individual differences in risk and intertemporal preference

Large changes to brain structure (e.g., from damage or disease) can explain alterations in behavior. It is therefore plausible that smaller structural differences in healthy samples can be used to better understand and predict individual differences in behavior. Despite the brains multivariate and distributed structure-to-function mapping, most studies have used univariate analyses of individual structural brain measures. Here we used a multivariate approach in a multimodal data set composed of volumetric, surface-based, diffusion-based, and functional resting-state MRI measures to predict reliable individual differences in risk and intertemporal preferences. We show that combining twelve brain structure measures led to better predictions across tasks than using any individual measure, and by examining model coefficients, we visualize the relative contribution of different brain measures from different brain regions. Using a multivariate approach to brain structure-to-function mapping that combines across many brain structure properties, along with reliably measured behavior phenotypes, may increase out-of-sample prediction accuracies and insight into neural underpinnings. Furthermore, this methodological approach may be useful to improve predictions and neural insight across basic, translational, and clinical research fields.

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bioRxiv2024

Altering subjective time perception leads to correlated changes in neural activity and delay discounting impulsivity

Several accounts of delay discounting suggest subjective time perception as a contributing factor to individually varying discount rates. That is, one may seem impatient if their subjective perception of delay is longer than others perception of it. Here we build upon the behavioral and neural research on time perception, and we investigate the effects of manipulating an individuals subjective time perception on their discount rates and neural activity. Using a novel time- counting task, we found that participants discount rates are affected by our manipulations of time perception and that neural activity also correlates with our manipulations in brain regions, such as the anterior insula and the superior temporal gyri, which have been implicated in time perception. We link these behavioral and neural findings together by showing that the degree of neural activity change in response to our manipulation is predictive of the degree of change in the participants discount rates.

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bioRxiv2023

Lesions to different regions of frontal cortex have dissociable effects on voluntary persistence

Deciding how long to keep waiting for uncertain future rewards is a complex problem. Previous research has shown that choosing to stop waiting results from an evaluative process that weighs the subjective value of the awaited reward against the opportunity cost of waiting. In functional neuroimaging data, activity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) tracks the dynamics of this evaluation, while activation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and anterior insula (AI) ramps up before a decision to quit is made. Here, we provide causal evidence of the necessity of these brain regions for successful performance in a willingness-to-wait task. 28 participants with frontal lobe lesions were tested on their ability to adaptively calibrate how long they waited for monetary rewards. We grouped the participants based on the location of their lesions, which were primarily in ventromedial, dorsomedial, or lateral parts of their prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, dmPFC, and lPFC, respectively), or in the anterior insula. We compared the performance of each subset of lesion participants to behavior in a control group without lesions (n=18). Finally, we fit a newly developed computational model to the data to glean a more mechanistic understanding of how lesions affect the cognitive processes underlying choice. We found that participants with lesions to the vmPFC waited less overall, while participants with lesions to the dmPFC and anterior insula were specifically impaired at calibrating their level of persistence to the environment. These behavioral effects were accounted for by systematic differences in parameter estimates from a computational model of task performance: while the vmPFC group showed reduced initial willingness to wait, lesions to the dmPFC/anterior insula were associated with slower learning from negative feedback. These findings corroborate the notion that failures of persistence can be driven by sophisticated cost-benefit analyses rather than lapses in self-control. They also support the functional specialization of different parts of the prefrontal cortex in service of voluntary persistence.

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bioRxiv2023

Dissociable contributions of the medial parietal cortex to recognition memory

Human neuroimaging studies of episodic memory retrieval routinely observe the engagement of specific cortical regions beyond the medial temporal lobe. Of these, medial parietal cortex (MPC) is of particular interest given its ubiquitous, and yet distinct, functional characteristics during different types of retrieval tasks. Specifically, while recognition memory and autobiographical recall tasks are both used to probe episodic retrieval, these paradigms consistently drive distinct patterns of response within MPC. This dissociation adds to growing evidence suggesting a common principle of functional organization across memory related brain structures, specifically regarding the control or content demands of memory-based decisions. To carefully examine this putative organization, we used a high-resolution fMRI dataset collected at ultra-high field (7T) while subjects performed thousands of recognition-memory trials to identify MPC regions responsive to recognition-decisions or semantic content of stimuli within and across individuals. We observed interleaving, though distinct, functional subregions of MPC where responses were sensitive to either recognition decisions or the semantic representation of stimuli, but rarely both. In addition, this functional dissociation within MPC was further accentuated by distinct profiles of connectivity bias with the hippocampus during task and rest. Finally, we show that recent observations of person and place selectivity within MPC reflect category specific responses from within identified semantic regions that are sensitive to mnemonic demands. Together, these data better account for how distinct patterns of MPC responses can occur as a result of task demands during episodic retrieval and may reflect a common principle of organization throughout hippocampal-neocortical memory systems. Significance statementMedial parietal cortex (MPC) plays a growing role in contemporary theories of episodic memory, as it is reliably observed in human neuroimaging to be engaged during tasks of recognition and retrieval. However, the spatial pattern of MPC engagement consistently differs across these putatively similar episodic memory tasks. Despite a large literature indicating that the MPC is important for episodic memory, there is little consensus about its specific role. Here, we employed precision-neuroimaging to identify dissociable interleaving MPC subregions, where activity reflected either memory-based decision-making or stimulus content. This dissociation within MPC provides a better understanding for how retrieval demands shape response patterns and speaks to growing evidence for a common principle of organization across memory structures of the human brain.

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bioRxiv2023

Less cortical complexity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex is associated with a greater preference for risky and immediate rewards

In our everyday lives, we are often faced with situations in which we have to make choices that involve risky or delayed rewards. However, the extent to which we are willing to accept larger risky (over smaller certain) or larger delayed (over smaller immediate) rewards vary across individuals. Here we investigated the relationship between cortical surface complexity in medial prefrontal cortex and individual differences in risky and intertemporal preferences. We found that lower cortical complexity in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) was associated with a greater preference for risky and immediate rewards. In addition to these common structural associations in mPFC, we also found associations between lower cortical complexity and a greater preference for immediate rewards that extended into left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and right vmPFC. Taken together, the shared association suggests that lower cortical complexity in vmPFC may be a structural marker for individual differences in impulsive behavior.

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bioRxiv2023

Individual Differences in Delay Discounting are Associated with Dorsal Prefrontal Cortex Connectivity in Youth

Delay discounting is a measure of impulsive choice relevant in adolescence as it predicts many real-life outcomes, including substance use disorders, obesity, and academic achievement. However, the functional networks underlying individual differences in delay discounting during youth remain incompletely described. Here we investigate the association between multivariate patterns of functional connectivity and individual differences in impulsive choice in a large sample of youth. A total of 293 youth (9-23 years) completed a delay discounting task and underwent resting-state fMRI at 3T. A connectome-wide analysis using multivariate distance-based matrix regression was used to examine whole-brain relationships between delay discounting and functional connectivity was then performed. These analyses revealed that individual differences in delay discounting were associated with patterns of connectivity emanating from the left dorsal prefrontal cortex, a hub of the default mode network. Delay discounting was associated with greater functional connectivity between the dorsal prefrontal cortex and other parts of the default mode network, and reduced connectivity with regions in the dorsal and ventral attention networks. These results suggest that delay discounting in youth is associated with individual differences in relationships both within the default mode network and between the default mode and networks involved in attentional and cognitive control.

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bioRxiv2021

Neural representations of stereotype content predict social decisions

To guide social interaction, people often rely on expectations about the traits of other people based on markers of social group membership, i.e., stereotypes. Although the influence of stereotypes on social behavior is widespread, key questions remain about how traits inferred from social group membership are instantiated in the brain and incorporated into neural computations that guide social behavior. Here, we show that the human lateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) represents the content of stereotypes about members of different social groups in the service of social decision-making. During fMRI scanning, participants decided how to distribute resources across themselves and members of a variety of social groups in a modified Dictator Game. Behaviorally, we replicated our recent finding that perceptions of others traits, captured by a two-dimensional framework of stereotype content (warmth and competence), biased participants monetary allocation choices in a context-dependent manner: recipients warmth increased advantageous inequity aversion and their competence increased disadvantageous inequity aversion. Neurally, representational similarity analysis (RSA) revealed that perceptions of others traits in the two-dimensional space were represented in the temporoparietal junction and superior temporal sulcus, two regions associated with mentalizing, and in the lateral OFC, known to represent latent environmental features during goal-directed outcome inference outside the social domain. Critically, only the latter predicted individual choices, suggesting that the effect of stereotypes on behavior is mediated by inference-based, domain-general decision-making processes in the OFC.

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bioRxiv2021

An fMRI-based brain marker predicts individual differences in delay discounting

Individual differences in impatience--how much we discount future compared to immediate rewards--are associated with general life outcomes and related to substance use, psychiatric diseases, and obesity. Here, we use machine-learning on fMRI activity during an intertemporal choice task to develop a brain marker of individual differences in delay discounting. Study 1 (N=110) was used as a training and cross-validation set, resulting in significant prediction accuracy (r = 0.49) and suggesting an interplay between brain regions associated with affect, value, and cognitive control. The validity of the brain marker was replicated in an independent data set (Study 2, N=145, r = 0.45). In both studies, responses of the marker significantly differed between overweight and lean individuals. This pattern is a first step towards a generalizable neuromarker of delay discounting and a potentially transdiagnostic phenotype, which can be used as a brain-based target measure in future studies.

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bioRxiv2021

Dynamic Representation of the Subjective Value of Information

To improve future decisions, people should seek information based on the value of information (VOI), which depends on the current evidence and the reward structure of the upcoming decision. When additional evidence is supplied, people should update VOI to adjust subsequent information seeking, but the neurocognitive mechanisms of this updating process remain unknown. We used a modified beads task to examine how the VOI is represented and updated in the human brain. We theoretically derived, and empirically verified, a normative prediction that the VOI depends on decision evidence and is biased by reward asymmetry. Using fMRI, we found that the subjective VOI is represented in right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC). Critically, this VOI representation was updated when additional evidence was supplied, showing that DLPFC dynamically tracks the up-to-date VOI over time. These results provide new insights into how humans adaptively seek information in the service of decision making.

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bioRxiv2021

The Future is Less Concrete than the Present: A Neural Signature of the Concreteness of Prospective Thought Is Modulated by Temporal Proximity during Intertemporal Decision-Making

Why do people discount future rewards? Multiple theories in psychology argue that future events are imagined less concretely than immediate events, thereby diminishing their perceived value. Here we provide neuroscientific evidence for this proposal. First, we construct a neural signature of the concreteness of prospective thought, using an fMRI dataset where the concreteness of imagined future events is orthogonal to their valence by design. Then, we apply this neural signature in two additional fMRI datasets, each using a different delay discounting task, to show that neural measures of concreteness decline as rewards are delayed farther into the future. Significance StatementPeople tend to devalue, or discount, outcomes in the future relative to those that are more immediate. This tendency is evident in peoples difficulty in making healthy food choices or saving money for retirement. Several psychological theories propose that discounting occurs because delayed outcomes are perceived less concretely that more immediate ones. Here we build a brain decoder for the concreteness of future thought and use this unobtrusive measure to show that outcomes are processed less concretely as they occur farther into the future.

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bioRxiv2021

Thresholded Partial Least Squares: Fast Construction of Interpretable Whole-brain Decoders

Recent neuroimaging research has shown that it is possible to decode mental states and predict future consumer behavior from brain activity data (a time-series of images). However, the unique characteristics (and high dimensionality) of neuroimaging data, coupled with a need for neuroscientifically interpretable models, has largely discouraged the use of the entire brains data as predictors. Instead, most neuroscientific research uses "regionalized" (partial-brain) data to reduce the computational burden and to improve interpretability (i.e., localizability of signal), at the cost of losing potential information. Here we propose a novel approach that can build whole-brain neural decoders (using the entire data set and capitalizing on the full correlational structure) that are both interpretable and computationally efficient. We exploit analytical properties of the partial least squares algorithm to build a regularized regression model with variable selection that boasts (in contrast to most statistical methods) a unique fit-once-tune-later approach where users need to fit the model only once and can choose the best tuning parameters post-hoc. We demonstrate its efficacy in a large neuroimaging dataset against off-the-shelf prediction methods and show that our new method scales exceptionally with increasing data size, yields more interpretable results, and uses less computational memory, while retaining high predictive power.

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