Neural processing of reward magnitude under varying attentional demands

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.

Research highlights
► Overlapping neural networks for reward-magnitude and task-related cognitive demands
► Reward-predictive activity co-varied with reward-magnitude and cognitive difficulty.
► Activity to cues in SPL/FEF was modulated by difficulty but not by reward-magnitude