Dialogue on economic choice, learning theory, and neuronal representations

- Economics and learning theory provide frameworks for understanding behavior.
- Experimental work has found neural activity encoding quantities defined in each.
- We discuss commonalities and differences between the two frameworks.
- We suggest that economic values are closely related to outcome values.

In recent years, two distinct lines of work have focused on the substrates of associative learning and on the mechanisms of economic decisions. While experiments often focused on the same brain regions - most notably the orbitofrontal cortex - the two literatures have remained largely distinct. Here we engage in a dialogue with the intent to clarify the relationship between the two frameworks. We identify a potential correspondence between the concept of outcome defined in learning theory and that of good defined in neuroeconomics, and we specifically discuss the concept of value defined in the two frameworks. While many differences remain unresolved, a common idea is that good/outcome values are subjective, devaluation-sensitive and computed on the fly, not 'cached' or pre-computed.