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In order to make decisions between disparate rewards such as when choosing between buying a refrigerator and booking a vacation, it is often suggested that the value of these rewards needs to be encoded on a “common scale or currency” so that it is possible to work out which option is more preferable to that individual. In this fMRI study, we found partially overlapping value-related activity within ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) during anticipation of juice and money reward outcomes, whereas the right anterior insula showed negative correlations as a function of increasing expected reward. These results indicate that vmPFC and anterior insula contain overlapping representations of anticipatory value, consistent with the existence of a common currency for the value of expected outcomes in these regions. (Kim et al., Cerebral Cortex, 2011).
In order to make decisions between disparate rewards such as when choosing between buying a refrigerator and booking a vacation, it is often suggested that the value of these rewards needs to be encoded on a “common scale or currency” so that it is possible to work out which option is more preferable to that individual. In this fMRI study, we found partially overlapping value-related activity within ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) during anticipation of juice and money reward outcomes, whereas the right anterior insula showed negative correlations as a function of increasing expected reward. These results indicate that vmPFC and anterior insula contain overlapping representations of anticipatory value, consistent with the existence of a common currency for the value of expected outcomes in these regions. (Kim et al., Cerebral Cortex, 2011).