title: Neural processing of reward magnitude under varying attentional demands.
abstract: Central to the organization of behavior is the ability to represent the magnitude of a prospective reward and the costs related to obtaining it. Therein, reward-related neural activations are discounted in dependence of the effort required to resolve a given task. Varying attentional demands of the task might however affect reward-related neural activations. Here we employed fMRI to investigate the neural representation of expected values during a monetary incentive delay task with varying attentional demands. Following a cue, indicating at the same time the difficulty (hard/easy) and the reward magnitude (high/low) of the upcoming trial, subjects performed an attention task and subsequently received feedback about their monetary reward. Consistent with previous results, activity in anterior-cingulate, insular/orbitofrontal and mesolimbic regions co-varied with the anticipated reward-magnitude, but also with the attentional requirements of the task. These activations occurred contingent on action-execution and resembled the response time pattern of the subjects. In contrast, cue-related activations, signaling the forthcoming task-requirements, were only observed within attentional control structures. These results suggest that anticipated reward-magnitude and task-related attentional demands are concurrently processed in partially overlapping neural networks of anterior-cingulate, insular/orbitofrontal, and mesolimbic regions.
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology and Centre for Advanced Imaging, Otto-von-Guericke-University, Leipziger Str. 44, 39120 Magdeburg, Germany. christian.stoppel@med.ovgu.de
authors.forename: Christian Michael
authors.initials: CM
authors.lastname: Stoppel
authors.forename: Carsten Nicolas
authors.initials: CN
authors.lastname: Boehler
authors.forename: Hendrik
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Strumpf
authors.forename: Hans-Jochen
authors.initials: HJ
authors.lastname: Heinze
authors.forename: Jens-Max
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Hopf
authors.forename: Mircea Ariel
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Schoenfeld
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000502:physiology*; D001931:Brain Mapping; D003463:Cues; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging; D008297:Male; D009042:Motivation / Q000502:physiology; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D012201:Reward