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Social decision-making is omnipresent in everyday life, carrying the potential for both positive and negative consequences for the decision-maker and those closest to them. While evidence suggests that decision-makers use value-based heuristics to guide choice behavior, very little is known about how decision-makers' representations of other agents influence social choice behavior. We used multivariate pattern expression analyses on fMRI data to understand how value-based processes shape neural representations of those affected by one's social decisions and whether value-based encoding is associated with social decision preferences. We found that stronger value-based encoding of a given close other (e.g. parent) relative to a second close other (e.g. friend) was associated with a greater propensity to favor the former during subsequent social decision-making. These results are the first to our knowledge to explicitly show that value-based processes affect decision behavior via representations of close others., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Cognitive systems that track, update, and utilize information about reward (consequences) and risk (uncertainty) are critical for adaptive decision-making as well as everyday functioning and well-being. However, it remains unclear how individual differences in reward and risk sensitivity are independently shaped by environmental influences and give rise to decision-making. Here, we investigated the impact of early life experience-a potent sculptor of development-on behavioral sensitivity to reward and risk. We administered a widely used decision-making paradigm to 55 adolescents and young adults who were exposed to early deprivation in the form of early institutional (orphanage) care (a type of early life adversity) and 81 comparison individuals who were reared by their biological parents and did not experience institutional care. Leveraging random coefficient regression and computational models, we observed that previously institutionalized individuals displayed general reward hyposensitivity, contributing to a decreased propensity to make decisions that stood to earn relatively large rewards relative to comparison individuals. By contrast, group differences in risk sensitivity were selectively observed on loss, but not gain, trials. These results are the first to independently and explicitly link early experiences to reward and risk sensitivity during decision-making. As such, they lay the groundwork for therapeutic efforts to identify and treat adversity-exposed individuals at risk for psychiatric disorders characterized by aberrant decision-making processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Understanding adolescent decision-making is significant for informing basic models of neurodevelopment as well as for the domains of public health and criminal justice. System-based theories posit that adolescent decision-making is guided by activity related to reward and control processes. While successful at explaining behavior, system-based theories have received inconsistent support at the neural level, perhaps because of methodological limitations. Here, we used two complementary approaches to overcome said limitations and rigorously evaluate system-based models. Using decision-level modeling of fMRI data from a risk-taking task in a sample of 20001 decisions across 51 human adolescents (25 females, mean age = 15.00 years), we find support for system-based theories of decision-making. Neural activity in lateral PFC and a multivariate pattern of cognitive control both predicted a reduced likelihood of risk-taking, whereas increased activity in the NAcc predicted a greater likelihood of risk-taking. Interactions between decision-level brain activity and age were not observed. These results garner support for system-based accounts of adolescent decision-making behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]