Neuronal substrates for choice under ambiguity

Economic forces shape the behavior of individuals and institutions. Forces affecting indi-vidual behavior are attitudes about payoffs (gains and losses) and beliefs about out-comes (risk and ambiguity). Under risk, the likelihoods of alternative outcomes are fully known. Under ambiguity, these likelihoods are unknown. In our experiment, payoffs and outcomes were manipulated independently during a classical choice task as brain activity was measured with positron emission tomography (PET). Here, we show that attitudes about payoffs and beliefs about the likelihood of outcomes exhibit interaction effects both behav-iorally and neurally. Participants are risk averse in gains and risk-seeking in losses; they are ambiguity-seeking in neither gains nor losses. Two neural substrates for choice surfaced in the interaction between attitudes and beliefs: a dorsomedial neocortical system and a ven-tromedial system. This finding reveals that the brain does not honor a prevalent assumption of economics—the independence of the evaluations of payoffs and outcomes. The demon-stration of a relationship between brain activity and observed economic choice attests to the feasibility of a neuroeconomic decision science