McGuire, Joseph T

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2012 - 20168
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  • Publication
    Rational Temporal Predictions Can Underlie Apparent Failures to Delay Gratification
    (2013-01-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph W
    An important category of seemingly maladaptive decisions involves failure to postpone gratification. A person pursuing a desirable long-run outcome may abandon it in favor of a short-run alternative that has been available all along. Here we present a theoretical framework in which this seemingly irrational behavior emerges from stable preferences and veridical judgments. Our account recognizes that decision makers generally face uncertainty regarding the time at which future outcomes will materialize. When timing is uncertain, the value of persistence depends crucially on the nature of a decision maker's prior temporal beliefs. Certain forms of temporal beliefs imply that a delay's predicted remaining length increases as a function of time already waited. In this type of situation, the rational, utility-maximizing strategy is to persist for a limited amount of time and then give up. We show empirically that people's explicit predictions of remaining delay lengths indeed increase as a function of elapsed time in several relevant domains, implying that temporal judgments offer a rational basis for limiting persistence. We then develop our framework into a simple working model and show how it accounts for individual differences in a laboratory task (the well-known “marshmallow test”). We conclude that delay-of-gratification failure, generally viewed as a manifestation of limited self-control capacity, can instead arise as an adaptive response to the perceived statistics of one's environment.
  • Publication
    Functionally Dissociable Influences on Learning Rate in a Dynamic Environment
    (2014-11-19) McGuire, Joseph T; Nassar, Matthew R; Kable, Joseph W; Gold, Joshua I
    Maintaining accurate beliefs in a changing environment requires dynamically adapting the rate at which one learns from new experiences. Beliefs should be stable in the face of noisy data but malleable in periods of change or uncertainty. Here we used computational modeling, psychophysics, and fMRI to show that adaptive learning is not a unitary phenomenon in the brain. Rather, it can be decomposed into three computationally and neuroanatomically distinct factors that were evident in human subjects performing a spatial-prediction task: (1) surprise-driven belief updating, related to BOLD activity in visual cortex; (2) uncertainty-driven belief updating, related to anterior prefrontal and parietal activity; and (3) reward-driven belief updating, a context-inappropriate behavioral tendency related to activity in ventral striatum. These distinct factors converged in a core system governing adaptive learning. This system, which included dorsomedial frontal cortex, responded to all three factors and predicted belief updating both across trials and across individuals.
  • Publication
    Decision Makers Calibrate Behavioral Persistence on the Basis of Time-Interval Experience
    (2012-08-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph W
    A central question in intertemporal decision making is why people reverse their own past choices. Someone who initially prefers a long-run outcome might fail to maintain that preference for long enough to see the outcome realized. Such behavior is usually understood as reflecting preference instability or self-control failure. However, if a decision maker is unsure exactly how long an awaited outcome will be delayed, a reversal can constitute the rational, utility-maximizing course of action. In the present behavioral experiments, we placed participants in timing environments where persistence toward delayed rewards was either productive or counterproductive. Our results show that human decision makers are responsive to statistical timing cues, modulating their level of persistence according to the distribution of delay durations they encounter. We conclude that temporal expectations act as a powerful and adaptive influence on people’s tendency to sustain patient decisions. Highlights ► Participants decided how long to wait for temporally uncertain rewards. ► The distribution of possible delays determines whether persistence is productive. ► Different conditions, matched for reward rate, required high or low persistence. ► With experience, decision makers appropriately adjusted their willingness to wait. ► Apparent failures of persistence can reflect adaptive temporal judgments.
  • Publication
    Do Political and Economic Choices Rely on Common Neural Substrates? A Systematic Review of the Emerging Neuropolitics Literature
    (2016-02-25) McGuire, Joseph T; Krastev, Sekoul; Kable, Joseph W; McNeney, Denver; Stolle, Dietlind; Gidengil, Elisabeth; Fellows, Lesley K
    The methods of cognitive neuroscience are beginning to be applied to the study of political behavior. The neural substrates of value-based decision-making have been extensively examined in economic contexts; this might provide a powerful starting point for understanding political decision-making. Here, we asked to what extent the neuropolitics literature to date has used conceptual frameworks and experimental designs that make contact with the reward-related approaches that have dominated decision neuroscience. We then asked whether the studies of political behavior that can be considered in this light implicate the brain regions that have been associated with subjective value related to “economic” reward. We performed a systematic literature review to identify papers addressing the neural substrates of political behavior and extracted the fMRI studies reporting behavioral measures of subjective value as defined in decision neuroscience studies of reward. A minority of neuropolitics studies met these criteria and relatively few brain activation foci from these studies overlapped with regions where activity has been related to subjective value. These findings show modest influence of reward-focused decision neuroscience on neuropolitics research to date. Whether the neural substrates of subjective value identified in economic choice paradigms generalize to political choice thus remains an open question. We argue that systematically addressing the commonalities and differences in these two classes of value-based choice will be important in developing a more comprehensive model of the brain basis of human decision-making.
  • Publication
    Do Political and Economic Choices Rely on Common Neural Substrates? A Systematic Review of the Emerging Neuropolitics Literature
    (2016-02-25) McGuire, Joseph T; Krastev, Sekoul; Kable, Joseph W; McNeney, Denver; Stolle, Dietlind; Gidengil, Elisabeth; Fellows, Lesley K.
    The methods of cognitive neuroscience are beginning to be applied to the study of political behavior. The neural substrates of value-based decision-making have been extensively examined in economic contexts; this might provide a powerful starting point for understanding political decision-making. Here, we asked to what extent the neuropolitics literature to date has used conceptual frameworks and experimental designs that make contact with the reward-related approaches that have dominated decision neuroscience. We then asked whether the studies of political behavior that can be considered in this light implicate the brain regions that have been associated with subjective value related to “economic” reward. We performed a systematic literature review to identify papers addressing the neural substrates of political behavior and extracted the fMRI studies reporting behavioral measures of subjective value as defined in decision neuroscience studies of reward. A minority of neuropolitics studies met these criteria and relatively few brain activation foci from these studies overlapped with regions where activity has been related to subjective value. These findings show modest influence of reward-focused decision neuroscience on neuropolitics research to date. Whether the neural substrates of subjective value identified in economic choice paradigms generalize to political choice thus remains an open question. We argue that systematically addressing the commonalities and differences in these two classes of value-based choice will be important in developing a more comprehensive model of the brain basis of human decision-making.
  • Publication
    Deciding to Curtail Persistence
    (2016-01-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph W
    Imagine that a few seconds ago you called a restaurant to book a reservation and were placed on hold. How soon do you expect to be helped? Are you having any difficulty waiting? Now imagine 5 minutes have gone by and you are still hearing hold music. Is it getting more difficult? Have your expectations changed? How much longer will you give them? Voluntary persistence toward delayed rewards has often been framed, in the psychological literature, as a self-control problem. This view presumes that it is generally beneficial to direct one's behavior toward valuable prospects in the future, but that the fallible nature of self-control makes people sometimes succumb to immediate temptations instead. In laboratory studies, individuals who wait longer for delayed rewards have been deemed to possess greater self-control capacity. In real life, though, how long it is worth holding out for future rewards can be a more vexed question. Not all long-run rewards is complicated by the fact that future events are uncertain in both their substance and their timing. When it comes to choosing how long to wait for everything from city buses to customer service representatives, decision makers can as easily err by waiting too long--chasing sunk costs-- as by waiting too little. In this chapter we review research suggesting that the challenge of delaying gratification does not emerge merely from psychological limitations but instead reflects the genuine complexity of the environments in which real-world decisions take place.
  • Publication
    Medial Prefrontal Cortical Activity Reflects Dynamic Re-Evaluation During Voluntary Persistence
    (2015-01-01) McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph W
    Deciding how long to keep waiting for future rewards is a nontrivial problem, especially when the timing of rewards is uncertain. We carried out an experiment in which human decision makers waited for rewards in two environments in which reward-timing statistics favored either a greater or lesser degree of behavioral persistence. We found that decision makers adaptively calibrated their level of persistence for each environment. Functional neuroimaging revealed signals that evolved differently during physically identical delays in the two environments, consistent with a dynamic and context-sensitive reappraisal of subjective value. This effect was observed in a region of ventromedial prefrontal cortex that is sensitive to subjective value in other contexts, demonstrating continuity between valuation mechanisms involved in discrete choice and in temporally extended decisions analogous to foraging. Our findings support a model in which voluntary persistence emerges from dynamic cost/benefit evaluation rather than from a control process that overrides valuation mechanisms.
  • Publication
    The Valuation System: A Coordinate-Based Meta-Analysis of BOLD fMRI Experiments Examining Neural Correlates of Subjective Value
    (2013-08-01) Bartra, Oscar; McGuire, Joseph T; Kable, Joseph W
    Numerous experiments have recently sought to identify neural signals associated with the subjective value (SV) of choice alternatives. Theoretically, SV assessment is an intermediate computational step during decision making, in which alternatives are placed on a common scale to facilitate value-maximizing choice. Here we present a quantitative, coordinate-based meta-analysis of 206 published fMRI studies investigating neural correlates of SV. Our results identify two general patterns of SV-correlated brain responses. In one set of regions, both positive and negative effects of SV on BOLD are reported at above-chance rates across the literature. Areas exhibiting this pattern include anterior insula, dorsomedialprefrontal cortex, dorsal and posterior striatum, and thalamus. The mixture of positive and negative effects potentially reflects an underlying U-shaped function, indicative of signal related to arousal or salience. In a second set of areas, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex and anterior ventral striatum, positive effects predominate. Positive effects in the latter regions are seen both when a decision is confronted and when an outcome is delivered, as well as for both monetary and primary rewards. These regions appear to constitute a “valuation system,” carrying a domain-general SV signal and potentially contributing to value-based decision making.