Choosing whether to exert effort to obtain rewards is fundamental to human motivated behavior. However, the neural dynamics underlying the evaluation of reward and effort in humans is poorly understood. Here, we report an exploratory investigation into this with chronic intracranial recordings from the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and basal ganglia (BG; subthalamic nuclei and globus pallidus) in people with Parkinson’s disease performing a decision-making task with offers that varied in levels of reward and physical effort required. This revealed dissociable neural signatures of reward and effort, with BG beta (12 to 20 Hz) oscillations tracking effort on a single-trial basis and PFC theta (4 to 7 Hz) signaling previous trial reward, with no effects of net subjective value. Stimulation of PFC increased overall acceptance of offers and sensitivity to reward while decreasing the impact of effort on choices. This work uncovers oscillatory mechanisms that guide fundamental decisions to exert effort for reward across BG and PFC, supports a causal role of PFC for such choices, and seeds hypotheses for future studies.

中文翻译：

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Beta 和 Theta 振荡跟踪人类基底神经节和前额皮质在决策过程中的努力和先前的奖励


选择是否付出努力来获得奖励是人类动机行为的基础。然而，人们对人类奖励和努力评估背后的神经动力学知之甚少。在这里，我们报告了一项探索性调查，对帕金森病患者的前额皮质 (PFC) 和基底神经节 (BG；底丘脑核和苍白球) 进行慢性颅内记录，执行决策任务时提供的信息水平各不相同。所需的奖励和体力努力。这揭示了奖励和努力的可分离神经特征，其中 BG beta（12 至 20 Hz）振荡跟踪单次试验的努力，PFC theta（4 至 7 Hz）发出先前试验奖励的信号，而没有净主观值的影响。 PFC 的刺激提高了对提议的总体接受度和对奖励的敏感性，同时减少了努力对选择的影响。这项工作揭示了指导基本决策以在 BG 和 PFC 中努力获得奖励的振荡机制，支持 PFC 对此类选择的因果作用，并为未来的研究奠定了假设。