Value, confidence, deliberation: a functional partition of the medial prefrontal cortex demonstrated across rating and choice tasks.

Deciding about courses of action involves minimizing costs and maximizing benefits. Decision neuroscience studies have implicated both the ventral and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC and dmPFC) in signaling goal value and action cost, but the precise functional role of these regions is still a matter of debate. Here, we suggest a more general functional partition that applies not only to decisions but also to judgments about goal value (expected reward) and action cost (expected effort). In this conceptual framework, cognitive representations related to options (reward value and effort cost) are dissociated from metacognitive representations (confidence and deliberation) related to solving the task (providing a judgment or making a choice). We used an original approach aiming at identifying consistencies across several preference tasks, from likeability ratings to binary decisions involving both attribute integration and option comparison. fMRI results in human male and female participants confirmed the vmPFC as a generic valuation system, its activity increasing with reward value and decreasing with effort cost. In contrast, more dorsal regions were not concerned with the valuation of options but with metacognitive variables, confidence being reflected in mPFC activity and deliberation time in dmPFC activity. Thus, there was a dissociation between the effort attached to choice options (represented in the vmPFC) and the effort invested in deliberation (represented in the dmPFC), the latter being expressed in pupil dilation. More generally, assessing commonalities across preference tasks might help reaching a unified view of the neural mechanisms underlying the cost/benefit tradeoffs that drive human behavior. Significance statement Decision neuroscience studies have implicated the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in forming the cognitive representations that drive human choice behavior. However, different studies using different tasks have suggested somewhat inconsistent links between precise computational variables and specific brain regions. Here, we use fMRI to demonstrate a robust functional partition of the mPFC that generalizes across tasks involving an estimation of goal value and/or action cost to provide a judgement or make a choice. This general functional partition makes a critical dissociation between neural representations of decisional factors (the expected costs and benefits attached to a given option) and metacognitive estimates (confidence in the judgment or choice, and effort invested in the deliberation process).