The most important decisions we make in life are value-based decisions, in which we make subjective value (SV) judgments of objects, people, or actions; and integrate risk with reward/loss to estimate the expected (subjective) value (EV) of decision outcomes. We may think we are consciously aware of all inner drives behind our value-based decisions, but we are only conscious of a fraction of what goes on in our brain at any given time, and the extent to which non-conscious neural processes influence our value-based decisions remains understudied. The few existing fMRI studies show that non-conscious rewards are processed subcortically and can influence economic decisions. In accordance with the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theory of consciousness, it was thus suggested that non-conscious reward processing is limited to subcortical areas, while conscious experience is necessary for reward information to reach higher-level areas such as prefrontal cortex (PFC). However, non-conscious influences on EV and SV, which are represented in anterior ventral striatum (aVS) and ventromedial PFC (vmPFC), have not been directly investigated, while non-conscious influences on PFC in other cognitive domains have emerged, and more sensitive analyses techniques are now available. We will therefore use attentional blink paradigms and fMRI with state-of-the-art Multi-Variate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) to directly test if non-conscious risk information influences EV in aVS and vmPFC, and if SV is automatically processed for non-conscious consumer goods in aVS and vmPFC.
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