Risk Evaluation Signals Code for Economic Risk Preferences

Objective : Our willingness to take risks has a large influence on decisions, such as health choices, financial investments or gambling behavior. It remains unclear, however, how risk preferences are integrated during the different stages of decision making. Here, we investigate how risk preferences are reflected in neural regions known to process risk evaluation in anticipation of risky outcomes. Methods: We collected functional MR images of 56 subjects during a simple gambling task that involves passive risk anticipation and the corresponding risk prediction error (Preuschoff et al., 2006, 2008). Subjects were…